Tom Leland

“Hakujin don't know when a smile is an insult." Hakujin were white people. She always said her experience showed that if you hated white people, they would just hate you back, and nothing would change in the world; and if you didn't hate them after the way they treated you, you would end up hating yourself, and nothing would change that way, either. So it was no good to hate them, and it was no good not to hate the. So nothing changed.”
― Cynthia Kadohata, Floating World

“At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.”
― Rose Macauley

“Happy people have neither age nor memory, they have no need of the past.”
― Tahar Djaout, L'invention Du Desert

“I wonder if anyone else in history had ever been as sad as I was at that moment. As soon as I wondered that, I knew the answer was yes. The answer was that millions of people had been sad.”
― Cynthia Kadohata, Kira-Kira