And when I raised myself to look at the man who'd spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall.

A geisha has studied a man's moods and his seasons. She fusses and he blooms.

Memoirs give the knowledge about the author and his environment. They are different from biography. Memoirs do not get ahead, and the man who writes a biography looks at his future like at a very simple thing.

Here again, I saw life in all its noisy excitement passing me by.

I didn't say to act dead. I said act helpless.

And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped around my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

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!