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

Some people have difficulty telling the difference between something great and something they've simply heard of.

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

I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulling me down toward them.

A wounded tiger is a dangerous beast.

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

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!