I was thanking him for...well, for something I'm not sure I can explain even now. For showing me that something besides cruelty could be found in the world, I suppose.

Watch for the thing that will show itself to you. Because that thing, when you find it, will be your future.

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

A mouse who wishes to fool the cat doesn't simply scamper out of its hole whenever it feels the slightest urge.

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.

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!

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