Gurkiratsingh Kohli

“The further I travel,
the more I long for the place
from where I have come.
How I envy the ebbing waves,
returning home.”
― Anonymous, The Tales of Ise

“Age has more wisdom than youth, just as youth has more beauty than does age.”
― Yoshida Kenkō, A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees

“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

“If you think, ‘I breathe,’ ” said Shunryu Suzuki, the Zen teacher, “the ‘I’ is extra.”
― Pico Iyer, A Beginner's Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations