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21 " Before me lies a voyage of a million miles, and my memory is the moonlight I will borrow to illuminate my way. "
― Tan Twan Eng , The Garden of Evening Mists
22 " The world goes by, the young and the hopeful, all head for their future. Where does that leave us? There is a misconception that we have reached our destinations the moment we grow old, but it is not a well-accepted fact that we are still travelling towards those destinations, still beyond our reach even on the day we close our eyes for the final time. "
― Tan Twan Eng , The Gift of Rain
23 " It begins to rain softly, raising goose-pimples on the pond’s skin. "
24 " I will dance to the music of words, for one more time. "
25 " I had loaded another weight onto his suffering and it hurt me to understand that while one person can never really share the pain of another, they can so easily and so heedlessly add to it. "
26 " Some element in the air between us changed, as though a wind that had been blowing gently had come to an abrupt stillness. "
27 " The tree of life is already doomed from the moment it is planted. "
28 " A garden is composed of a variety of clocks, Aritomo had once told me. Some of them run faster than the others, and some of them move slower than wee can ever perceive. I only understood this fully long after I had been his apprentice. "
29 " The mind forgets, but the heart will always remember. And what is the heart’s memory but love itself? "
30 " Time did not exist; I had no idea of how many minutes had passed. And what was time but merely a wind that never stopped? "
31 " Duty is a concept created by emperors and generals to deceive us into performing their will. Be wary when duty speaks, for it often masks the voice of others. "
32 " Was this part of the process of growing up, that we finally noticed the people closest to us in a different, clearer light? "
33 " She saw the stubborn set of my face. "I've never felt blessed," I said. "There must be free will to choose. Do you know the poem about the two roads, and the one not taken?" Yes. That has always amused me, because who created the two roads in the first place?" It was a question I had never considered. "
― Tan Twan Eng
34 " I realize that there are fragments of my life that I do not want to lose, if only because I still have not found the knot to tie them up with. "
35 " Never meet a person’s anger directly. Deflect, distract him, even agree with him. Unbalance his mind, and you can lead him anywhere you want. "
36 " It was odd how Aritomo's life seemed to glance off mine; we were like two leaves falling from a tree, touching each other now and again as they spiraled to the forest floor. "
37 " One question remained to me. “If a higher level of bujutsu involves fighting with the mind, what then is the very highest level?” He closed his eyes for a while, seeing things he would never show me. “That,” he said, “would be never to fight at all. "
38 " The young have hopes and dreams, while the old hold the remains of them in their hands and wonder what has happened to their lives. "
39 " You’ve forgiven the British?” He subsided into his seat. For a while he was silent, his gaze turned inward. “They couldn’t kill me when we were at war. And they couldn’t kill me when I was in the camp,” he said finally, his voice subdued. “But holding on to my hatred for forty-six years . . . that would have killed me. "
40 " Time seems to overlap, like the shadows of leave pressing down on other leave, layer upon layer. "