If you have experienced an evening more exciting than any in your life, you're sad to see it end; and yet you still feel grateful that it happened.

Perhaps it seems odd that a casual meeting on the street could have brought about such change. But sometimes life is like that isn't it

You know, the men go to tea houses with the expectation that they will have a nice quiet evening and not read about it the next morning in the newspaper.

A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.

And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped around my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

It's less a matter of looking the other way than of closing our eyes to what we can't stop from happening.

If you have experienced an evening more exciting than any in your life, you're sad to see it end; and yet you still feel grateful that it happened.