The Garden Of Evening Mists Quotes
"Not many people would have known of him before the war, but I did."
"What words could have healed my pain, returned my sister to me? None."
"Memories I had locked away have begun to break free, like shards of ice fracturing off an arctic shelf."
"I wish you a long and peaceful retirement, Judge Teoh."
"She wanted to tell you how grateful she was that you paid her hospital bills."
"Memories are the only things that don't change when everything else does."
"The murmurings of the house hover in the air when I open my eyes."
"The house sits on low stilts and the verandah is two feet above the ground."
"The bamboo blinds creak when I scroll them up."
"The mountains are as I have always remembered them."
"The bamboo creaking and knocking in the breeze, the broken mosaic of sunlight scattered over the ground."
"The world seems different, somehow, when I open my eyes again."
"Built nearly a century ago, the Supreme Court building in Kuala Lumpur had the solidity of a colonial structure."
"It wasn’t easy working for you all these years, Puan, but I’m glad I did."
"What is gardening but the controlling and perfecting of nature?"
"The air became colder, but I remained out there."
"The mountains swallowed up the sun, and night seeped into the valleys."
"In the leaves, an unseen bird whistled, deepening the emptiness of the air between each note."
"I had not seen a Japanese nor spoken to one in nearly six years."
"The more details they could include, the better they were insulated from the horrors around them."
"Day by day we added details to it. The garden became our refuge."
"It was the only way that I would be allowed to examine the court documents and official records."
"I was searching for information about my camp. I wanted to find where my sister was buried."
"Not every guilty Japanese was charged, much less punished."
"You’ve been here eleven years, I said, gazing around us. "I would have thought that the garden would’ve been completed by now."
"Then it is clear that you know very little. Rocks have to be dug up and moved. Trees have to be taken out and replanted. Everything has to be done by hand—everything."
"The smell of roasting leaves dusted the air; I felt I had pried open a tea caddy."
"The discovery of tin in the Kinta Valley in the eighteenth century had compelled the British to ship indentured coolies from southern China to work the mines."
"I never wondered about it, just as I never thought it strange that I should also have been born beneath the monsoon skies of the equator."
"Place the first stone properly and the others will follow its request. The effect expands through the whole garden."
"The best way to learn is to look at nature. Draw what you see, what moves you. Return only when the winter snows begin to fall."
"Every aspect of gardening is a form of deception."
"Your memories are a form of shakkei too. You bring them in to make your life here feel less empty."
"Heaven’s way is like the pulling of a bow, bringing down the high and raising up the low."
"The palest ink will endure beyond the memories of men."
"In the space between releasing the bowstring and the arrow hitting the target, I discovered a quiet place I could escape into, a slit in time in which I could hide."
"The central purpose of kyudo was to train the mind, to strengthen our focus through every ritualized movement we made in the shajo."
"In decreeing the way I had to breathe, kyudo was showing me how to live."
"You let go of your connection with the arrow too early," Aritomo said. "Hold it with your mind, tell it where you want it to go, and guide it all the way."
"The scheme has provided us with quite a lot of useful intelligence."
"We’re all dying," I say. "Day by day; second by second."
"That first day when you came to see me," he said, "you mentioned that you had become friends with Tominaga Noburu."
"It’s been drunk by everyone, from thieves and beggars to writers and poets."
"The emperor who discovered tea after some leaves dropped into a pot of water he was boiling?"
"I realized that I must sound like I’m back in the courtroom, picking up on some inconsistency in a witness statement."
"When the English took their first cup of tea, they were really drinking to the eventual fall of the Chinese Empire."
"The reams of laws under the Emergency Regulations gave the security forces nearly unlimited powers in matters relating to the insurgency."
"Despite telling myself not to be intimidated, I had to fight off the fear rising up inside me."
"I was the last one to get out from the car when we arrived at the entrance to Yugiri."
"The light in here seemed softer, older, the air sharp with the tang of the yellowing bamboo leaves."
"The pond is called Usugumo. Wisps of Clouds."
"Evening Mists. A name even more obvious than Wisps of Clouds."
"I have not seen nor spoken to anyone from home since the war ended."
"I thought it would be easier to swallow it than refuse her."
"Once, when I was being disobedient, my mother told me a story about a murderer."
"It is only the hearts and minds of men that are restless."
"Everything that had happened since then had brought me to this place in the mountains, this moment in time."
"A family’s wealth will not last beyond three generations."
"Don’t eat so much, Ling, no man wants a fat wife."
"In turn, we Straits Chinese laughed at them for their uncouth ways and pitied them their inability to get good jobs."
"People think that Japan entered the war through Pearl Harbor, but Malaya was the first door they smashed open."
"You can always tell which side a man supports, just by looking at whose photograph he puts up in his home."
"Every time we heard the fruit dropping through the branches, we’d look up quickly, just to be on the safe side."
"We gave the worst of the guards nicknames: Mad Dog, Butcher, Pus-Face, Shit-Brains, the Black Death."
"One afternoon my father made us go to Ah Poon’s house. All the women, including Old Mr. Ong’s wives, were queuing up to have their hair cut by Ah Poon’s wife."
"I realized it was the only thing he could have said. We were in the middle of a war, and logic and reason had no place in it."
"Memory is like patches of sunlight in an overcast valley, shifting with the movement of the clouds."
"We were the only ones left from those withered days."
"Nature has its own rhythm, a sequence of life that moves to the immutable schedule of time."
"A garden is composed of a variety of clocks."
"I have spent most of my life trying to forget, and now all I want is to remember."
"Before me lies a voyage of a million miles, and memory is the moonlight I will borrow to illuminate my way."