Anyone can have a good day. The question is what do you do on a bad day. That's when you're being tested. In a very tangible sense, a bad day shows your innermost essence more than a good day.

Was life nothing more than a storm that constantly washed away what had been there only a moment before, and left behind something barren and unrecognizable?

We don't become geisha because we want our lives to be happy; we become geisha because we have no choice.

If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even a stone can be worn down with enough rain.

Occasionally in life we come upon things we can't understand, because we have never seen anything similar.

For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I'd always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness-- a world in which fathers didn't sell their daughters.

of course the pace of change never slows, even when we've convinced ourselves it will.