And make death proud to take us.

-

Cleopatra

I will not be triumphed over.

-

Cleopatra

I’ve traveled

That dark path to the world

Which comes down from this mountain

Just to see you

One last time.

-

Ono no Komachi

Is this love reality

Or a dream?

I cannot know,

When both reality and dreams

Exist without truly existing

-

Ono no Komachi

The color of the flower has faded,

while I lost myself in

idle thought in this long rain

-

Ono no Komachi

What is it about this twilight hour? Even the sound of a barely perceptible breeze pierces the heart.

-

Ono no Komachi

Beauty without colour seems somehow to belong to another world.

-

Murasaki Shikibu

I leave you, to go the road we all must go. The road I would choose, if only I could, is the other

-

Murasaki Shikibu

If you are scorched earth, I will be warm rain

-

Murasaki Shikibu

It is in general the unexplored that attracts us.

-

Murasaki Shikibu

No art or learning is to be pursued halfheartedly...and any art worth learning will certainly reward more or less generously the effort made to study it.

-

Murasaki Shikibu

farewell' is a monster among words, and never yet sounded kindly in any ear.

-

Murasaki Shikibu

The world know it not; but you, Autumn, I confess it: your wind at night-fall stabs deep into my heart

-

Murasaki Shikibu

Real things in the darkness seem no realer than dreams

-

Murasaki Shikibu

You are here to remind me of someone I long for, and what is it you long for yourself? We must have been together in an earlier life, you and I.

-

Murasaki Shikibu

"To know yourself is to forget yourself."

-

Kūkai

The beginning is always today

-

Mary Wollstonecraft

Nothing can dim the light that shines from within.

—

Maya Angelou

No need to hurry, no need to sparkle, no need to be anybody but oneself.

—

Virginia Woolf

We can’t become what we need to be by remaining what we are.

-

Oprah Winfrey