We don't become geisha because we want our lives to be happy; we become geisha because we have no choice.

For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I'd always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness-- a world in which fathers didn't sell their daughters.

In the instant before the door opened, I could almost sense my life expanding just like a river whose waters have begun to swell; for I had never before taken such a drastic step to change the course of my own future. I was like a child tiptoeing along a precipice overlooking the sea. And yet somehow I hadn't imagined a great wave might come and strike me there, and wash everything away.

My feelings of disgust had been so loud within me, they’d nearly drowned out everything else.

No one knows the author of memoir so well like himself.

I worried she might spend an afternoon chatting with me about the sights and then wish me best of luck.

This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes they consume us completely.