The corridor couldn't have smelled more strongly of fish guts if we had actually been inside a fish.

Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.

All at once I felt so vain, like a girl posturing for the crowds as she walks along, only to discover the street is empty.

Can't you see? Every step I have taken, since I was that child on the bridge, has been to bring myself closer to you.

What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realized I'd never really tasted to things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been. What life would I have? I would be like the dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.

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.

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