The mastery of writing is ultimately an aesthetics, and it comes down to whether one can create one's own style.

Beauty is always discovered in the actualities of living.

We Orientals create beauty by generating shadows in places that are nothing special.

My strength uproots mountains, my spirit overshadows the world.

-- Xiang Yu

If I can make even one person happy in my lifetime, that is my own happiness.

-- Yasunari Kawabata

Beauty is always discovered in the actualities of living.

-- Jun'ichirō Tanizaki

This world, I think of it as my own, like the full moon lacking nothing at all.

-- Murasaki Shikibu

Life is not worth a single line of Baudelaire.

-- Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

I loved you: love perhaps has not yet faded entirely from my soul.

-- Alexander Pushkin