Kyoko Mori > Quotes

“Let me drive you out of the fire into a day of humble miracles.”
― Kyoko Mori, Fallout

“No one should be at the mercy of their own feelings.”
― Kyoko Mori, Stone Field, True Arrow: A Novel

“Loving a human is largely mental and abstract. Not so with cats. I am always restored to myself when my arms are encircling their rounded backs or I'm burying my face in their fur, all of me in touch with whatever animates us alone, together.”
― Kyoko Mori, Cat and Bird: A Memoir

“It seems more a comfort than a source of grief to know that the past stays the same, that we are never completely free from it.”
― Kyoko Mori, The Dream of Water: A Memoir

“Sometimes, when I feel like crying, I remember what my mother used to say to make me laugh - a Japanese saying she repeated because it sounded funny: sakki naita karasu ga mo warau. It meant, "The crow that was crying a few minutes ago is already laughing now." My mother didn't have to scold my brother and me for crying or encourage us to be stoic, because she could usually make us laugh. When she repeated this saying. I imagined the three of us - my mother, brother, and me - turning into big black birds flapping our wings and screaming. I laughed. picturing us perched on trees and cawing. If we were crows, I thought no one would know if we were laughing or crying.

This was my mother's gift. Crows are smart and stubborn. They are tough birds that survive and wheel around in the sky on their big wings. My mother wanted us to imagine ourselves flying around making a racket, and laughing-crying-singing. In Japanese, the word for crying, naku, also means birds making noise," although the two verbs are written with different pictorial characters. In conversation the two words sound exactly the same: a flock of blackbirds rise up to the sky, leaving us with the clamor of their singing and crying.”
― Kyoko Mori, Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught Between Cultures