"But to kill a man for being stupid is wrong,-- and that wrong will be repaid. So surely as you kill me, so surely shall I be avenged; -- out of the resentment that you provoke will come the vengeance; and evil will be rendered for evil."..."
This is a quote from the story Diplomacy and the man who is about to be executed speaks to his executioner. Kwaidan stories are strongly focused on karma and the paying of one's debts, in this life or the next, more probable being in the next. The man having nothing else to hold onto, the last straw of hope has been taken from him, so he starts threatening with vengeance after death. The debt is of course is repaid but not in the way the stupid man thought because even in his last moment he proved himself stupid and got outsmarted by his executioner.
"She thought about the old saying that a mirror is the Soul of a Woman -- (a saying mystically expressed, by the Chinese character for Soul, upon the backs of many bronze mirrors),-- and she feared that it was true in weirder ways than she had before imagined."
This is a quote from the story Of a Mirror and a Bell. After giving away her mirror to the priests for making of a bell a young woman feels like she shouldn't have done that because the mirror was in her family for generations and it feels like she gave away a part of herself. She becomes obsessed with getting her mirror back. The mirror itself is not what represents her soul but it is the memories connected to the object and the emotional value of it that makes the woman long for it. It represents her history and her connection to her family.
"But all that existed of the real Robert must long ago have suffered a sea-change into something rich and strange..."
This is a quote from the story Hi-Mawari. The narrator remembers his friend from childhood in a melancholic way. He remembers their purity from childhood and how a Harper's song about sunflowers made him cry. The childhood was the time when they were truly themselves without all the pretenses that come with growing up. He bitterly remarks that the real Robert is gone meaning the innocence from their childhood is gone and turned into something rich and strange.
