Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.

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

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

I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.

He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.

I studied Japanese language and culture in college and graduate school, and afterward went to work in Tokyo, where I met a young man whose father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha. He and I never discussed his parentage, which was an open secret, but it fascinated me.

From this experience, I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn't there. What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I'd spent every day watching for a man who would never come to me? What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realize I'd never really tasted the things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been, because I'd thought of nothing but the Chairman even while my life was drifting away from me. And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.