Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field on...
As a young girl I believed my life would never have been a struggle if Mr.Tanaka hadn't torn me away from my tipsy house. But now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the o...
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.
Another motive as well—namely, to preserve her voice, which had a quality of expressiveness I have rarely encountered. Customarily she spoke with a soft tone, as one might expect of a woman who has ma...
You're eighteen years old, Sayuri, she went on. Neither you nor I can know your destiny. You may never know it! Destiny isn't always like a party at the end of the evening. Sometimes it's nothing more...
Whatever any of us may have thought about Hatsumomo, she was like an empress in our okiya since she earned the income be which we all lived. And being an empress she would have been very displeased, u...
We don't become geisha because we want our lives to be happy; we become geisha because we have no choice.
Waiting patiently doesn't suit you. I can see you have a great deal of water in your personality. Water never waits. It changes shape and flows around things, and finds the secret paths no one else ha...
Todos sabemos que una escena invernal de árboles cubiertos con mantos de nieve sería irreconocible a la primavera siguiente. No me podía imaginar, sin embargo, que algo así podía suceder dentro de nos...
This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes they consume us completely.
I must tell you something about necks in Japan, if you don't know it; namely, that Japanese men, as a rule, feel about a woman's neck and throat the same way that men in the West might feel about a wo...
I lived in that contented state a long while before I was finally able to look back and admit how desolate my life had once been. I’m sure I could never have told my story otherwise; I don’t think any...
I knew he noticed the tress, and the mud, and the children in the street, but I had no reason to believe he'd ever notice me.
I had to wonder if men were so blinded by beauty that they would feel privileged to live their lives with an actual demon, so long as it was a beautiful demon.
I fell into a sound sleep and dreamed that I was at a banquet back in Gion, talking with an elderly man who was explaining to me that his wife, whom he'd cared for deeply, wasn't really dead because t...
I dont think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.
Chairman: Sometimes, he sighed, I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.
Because I'd lived through adversity once before, what I learned about myself was like a reminder of something I'd once known but had nearly forgotten-namely, that beneath the elegant clothing, and the...
A tree may look as beautiful as ever; but when you notice the insects infesting it, and the tips of the branches that are brown from disease, even the trunk seems to lose some of its magnificence.
Каквито и да са битките и победите ни, както и да ги преживяваме, много скоро те избледняват като воднисто мастило върху хартия.