Long or short, if you worry about every step of a journey, you will divide it endlessly into pieces, anyone of which may defeat you. Look only to the end.

Many will rant and rave against the garment fate has woven for them, but they pick it up and don it all the same, and most wear it to the end of their days. You... you would rather go naked into the storm.

Children, I have found, are much more swift to accept the unusual. They admit their curiosity, you see, rather than disdaining the object that arouses it.

I don’t want to have these burdens. But I can’t bear to turn them over to anyone else, either. Because, despite all the work, I like being in control of my own life.

And like a child, I’d be testing the people who loved me, pulling away from them almost for the sole reason of seeing if anyone would come after me.

I was very tired of being hit, but it seemed like the one thing I did well lately.

I had read a poem about a girl with ‘silvery laughter’ but Shun’s sounded to me as if someone had fallen down a long flight of steps with a basket of cheap tin pans.

Once she would have found him mysterious and alluring. She had grown wiser. Dangerous men were neither romantic nor exotic; they were men who could hurt you.

The carriageway to the front door was wide, and graceful white birches lined it. In autumn they shed a carpet of gold on the road, and in winter, burdened with snow, they arched over it, a frosted white tunnel paned with glimpses of blue sky.

When had it become so ingrained in her to apologize whenever she wanted something for herself?