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

And when I raised myself to look at the man who'd spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall.

We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.

I stumbled out into the courtyard to try to flee my misery, but of course we can never flee the misery that is within us.

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

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.

A geisha has studied a man's moods and his seasons. She fusses and he blooms.