Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.

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

She paints her face to hide her face. Her eyes are deep water. It is not for Geisha to want. It is not for geisha to feel. Geisha is an artist of the floating world. She dances, she sings. She entertains you, whatever you want. The rest is shadows, the rest is secret.

At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us-so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe.

Friendship is a precious thing, Sayuri. One mustn't throw it away.

Nothing is as bleak as the future, except the past.