Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.

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

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

It's your duty to use what influence you have, unless you want to drift through life like a fish belly-up on the stream" "I wish I could believe that life really is something more than a stream that carries us along, belly-up" "Alright, if it's a stream, you're still free to be in this part of it or that part, aren't you? The water will divide again and again. If you bump, and tussle, and fight, and make use of whatever advantages you might have-" "Oh, that's fine, I'm sure, when you have advantages." "You'd find them everywhere, if you ever bothered to look!

As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.

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

When a man takes a mistress, he doesn't turn around and divorce his wife.