How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart Quotes

“This is the price of leaving: you will always be late to the news, you will always miss the most important and unexpected moments of the lives you left behind, and you will always come back to a place that went on changing without you. I was already familiar with it. I’ve done it so many times. I was going to do it again.”
― Florentyna Leow, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart

“Home has always been where I once was, and wherever I’m coming back to. There’s a Japanese idiom, 住めば都 sumeba miyako, loosely ‘home is where you decide it is’.”
― Florentyna Leow, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart

“Later, someone told me that relationships have a best-before date. What he actually said was 賞味期限 shoumikigen, literally 'the limit of taste'. Technically still edible, but it won't taste good anymore. It won't be at its best. This is a good way to think about growing apart from people, failing to keep in touch, losing touch, letting them go. It made me feel a little better about the friends I had lost; it reminded me that the ones who are here outnumber those who aren't. Some relationships also have a 消費期限 shouhikigen, a real expiry date, the point which something is no longer usable and has to be thrown out.”
― Florentyna Leow, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart

“We leave broken eggshells behind us all the time; the point is to make them count.”
― Florentyna Leow, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart

“I was scared of everything – leaving, moving forward, everything.”
― Florentyna Leow, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart

“We take turns becoming the one who leaves. We make ghosts of ourselves and the ones we once loved. Like seasons we change, we transition into the next life. We try and fail to forget. We grow, outgrow and are outgrown. But none of it ever, ever seems to hurt any less.”
― Florentyna Leow, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart

“First we would receive an introduction to the art of tea ceremony from tea master Michael Sōzui. (Michael once corrected me: 'tea ceremony' as a concept doesn't exist in Japanese; the word is a product of Western imagination and projection. Its name is 茶道 sadō, the way of tea. For this, one does not just drink tea; one practises tea. Tell someone in Kyoto that you do tea, and the meaning is clear. Similarly, 'tea master' is a misnomer: they are 茶人 chajin, or 'tea person', a person who practises making tea.)”
― Florentyna Leow, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart

“I felt cared for in a way that felt expansive and often unexpected, though there were also times when that well-meaning tenderness magnified the sheer impossibility of being understood.”
― Florentyna Leow, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart

“What reined in my instincts then was the desire to hide: to keep the sanctity of 'my' space intact, to avoid unexpected encounters with anyone from my 'real' life. We all have our own corners of the earth we run to.”
― Florentyna Leow, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart

“Until recently - perhaps mid-2010s - accounts of being a foreigner in Japan were dominated by white, usually male, Anglo-centric perspectives. (Alright, not that much as changed.) They talk about 'doing the gaijin nod when you see another gaijin on the street.' (No one has ever done this to me.) They talk about playing the 'gaijin card' to get out of sticky situations, like, say, pretending not to speak any Japanese when they've forgotten to buy the correct ticket for the express train, so the hapless station attendant decides to let them go. There's a certain group of people (men) who drift through life here with the barest smattering of Japanese for decades relying on their Japanese spouses (wives) to keep the cogs of daily life spinning; this will never be viable for me. I will never experience the minor celebrity of being a white person in rural Japan (on balance, much healthier for one's ego), nor will I ever be someone people approach and fawn over because they want to make foreign friends (eventually, I realised this was also better), nor will local people ever compliment my looks (there was always a small part of me that wished I was noticeably beautiful). I've been perceived as a Japanese woman in unexpected ways. For example, at a musical gathering, an older white man once turned to me and asked: So whose wife are you? It took a great deal of self-restraint not to slap him.”
― Florentyna Leow, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart

“And yet, looking back on those years from the light of today, I wouldn't change a thing. More precisely, I wouldn't have said no to Kyoto. Neither laughter nor tears, heartache or joy: I wouldn't trade any of it.”
― Florentyna Leow, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart

“in all of them I’m really returning to a version of a city I knew. Old haunts, old habits, old memories.”
― Florentyna Leow, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart

“I descend from a group of people whose identity is predicated on movement and migration. Hakka people are a cultural subgroup of the Han Chinese, 客家人, ‘guest people’, and they are scattered across the world. I grew up itching to leave home. My outsiderness is built into my heritage.”
― Florentyna Leow, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart

“My heart catches a little, as though there’s a glass splinter inside. I’m already weeping for the moment as it slips away. I’m happy. It hurts. I think this is where I’m supposed to be.”
― Florentyna Leow, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart

“To love a place is to love its people, and to love a place is to let it break your heart.”
― Florentyna Leow, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart

“Each city has been the stage for a life lived. A different cast, a new storyline. Meetings, departures, heartbreaks. Another notch, another scar on my heart.”
― Florentyna Leow, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart

“Who among us hasn’t lost a friend or several? Or decided to shed one ourselves? We take turns becoming the one who leaves. We make ghosts of ourselves and the ones we once loved. Like seasons we change, we transition into the next life. We try and fail to forget. We grow, outgrow and are outgrown. But none of it ever, ever seems to hurt any less.”
― Florentyna Leow, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart

“It’s okay to miss someone who isn’t in your life anymore.”
― Florentyna Leow, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart

“When you try to belong somewhere, your chosen home becomes a reminder of what you stand to lose. It will shape you, make you, break you. To love a place is to love its people, and to love a place is to let it break your heart.”
― Florentyna Leow, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart

“A city cannot love you back.”
― Florentyna Leow, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart

“Pleas for help, prayers that didn't work out. Pacing around in mental circles like this made sense to me in a strange and twisted way, girded with the internal logic of the anxious and depressed.”
― Florentyna Leow, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart

“Some days it was like a muscle: once I'd warmed up, my tongue ran along nicely. Some days I didn't even have to try, as it flowed out of me like a fountain; others days it was like trying to run across a field of nettles in shoes three sizes too big.”
― Florentyna Leow, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart

“This is the price of leaving: you will always be late to the news, you will always miss the important and unexpected moments of the lives you left behind, and you will always come back to a place that went on changing without you.”
― Florentyna Leow, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart

“You always knew I had no talent for subtlety. With me, if it rained, it poured. But it was too late by the time I understood: we got along because we were both sentimental people. You just hid it far, far better.”
― Florentyna Leow, How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart