“We must learn to live with danger, " he now said to Kino. "Do you mean the ocean and the volcano cannot hurt us if we are not afraid?" Kino asked. "No," his father replied. "I did not say that. Ocean is there and volcano is there. It is true that on any day ocean may rise into storm and volcano may burst into flame. We must accept this fact, but without fear. We must say, 'Someday I shall die, and does it matter whether it is by ocean or volcano, or whether I grow old and weak?' " "I don't want to think about such things," Kino said. "it is right for you not to think about them," his father said. "Then do not be afraid. When you are afraid, you are thinking about them all the time. Enjoy life and don not fear death - that is the way of a good Japanese.”

“To those at the great house it means nothing, this handful of earth, but to me it means how much!" (Buck, 57)”

“Inside myself is a place where I live all alone, and that's where I renew my springs that never dry up. ~Pearl Buck”

“Of course imagination is the beginning of creation. Without imagination there can be no creation.”

“Whatever came to him was good. It was life. It was knowledge.”

“This was his mind, a storehouse, a computer programmed to life, minute by minute, hour by hour, day and night.”

“There was no need to hurry that future—yet the length of his own youth pressed upon him. Whatever he was to do next he wanted to begin now. But how to begin and on what?”

“For he came to perceive that since people were his study, his teachers, the objects through which he could satisfy his persistent wonder about life itself, his own being among others, wherever he lived for the moment, there was his home.”

“Crowds moved wherever he went, across the bridge to Manhattan, in New York, wherever he went, life flowed and eddied, but he was not part of it.”

“To take each day as a separate page, to be read carefully, savoring all of the details, this is best for me, I think.”

“One faces the future with one's past.”