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

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.

When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.

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

By the time we arrived, as evening was approaching, I felt as sore as a rock must feel when the waterfall has pounded on it all day long.

Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.

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