Gurkiratsingh Kohli

“One bright moonlit night, when I was on a journey and staying in a house by a bamboo grove, I awoke to the sound of the leaves rustling in the wind. As I lay there, unable to go back to sleep, I wrote the poem,

'Night after night I lie awake,
Listening to the rustle of the bamboo leaves,
And a strange sadness fills my heart.”
― Lady Sarashina, As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams

“Speech is dangerous in Japan, precisely because so many unspoken rules hover around it. It’s generally a bad idea to use the word “you”—too intrusive—and there are said to be twenty ways of saying “I.” Women are expected to refer to themselves in the third person, men not. A single verb in Yasunari Kawabata’s short novel Snow Country is translated in twenty-nine different ways because what we would render as “I think” can in Japan mean “I remember,” “I long for” or twenty-seven other things.”
― Pico Iyer, A Beginner's Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations

“After all, things thought but left unsaid only fester inside you.”
― Yoshida Kenkō, A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees

“A beginner should not hold two arrows,' his teacher told him. 'You will be careless with the first, knowing you have a second. You must always be determined to hit the target with the single arrow you shoot, and have no thought beyond this.”
― Yoshida Kenkō, A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees