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

I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.

If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.

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.

But what I could see out of the corner of my eye made me think of two lovely bundles of silk floating along a stream. In a moment they were hovering on the walkway in front of me, where they sank down and smoothed their kimono across their knees.

Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.

From this experience, I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn't there. What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I'd spent every day watching for a man who would never come to me? What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realize I'd never really tasted the things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been, because I'd thought of nothing but the Chairman even while my life was drifting away from me. And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.