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.
It’s less a matter of looking the other way than of closing our eyes to what we can’t stop from happening.
We human beings have a remarkable way of growing accustomed to things.
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.
You know, the men go to tea houses with the expectation that they will have a nice quiet evening and not read about it the next morning in the newspaper.
His face was very heavily creased, and into each crease he had tucked some worry or other, so that it wasn’t really his face any longer, but more like a tree that had nests of birds in all of the branches. He had to struggle constantly to manage it and always looked worn out from the effort.
You seemed so desperate, like you might drown if someone didn’t save you.
I began to feel that all the people I’d ever known who had died or left me had not in fact gone away, but continued to live on inside me just as this man’s wife lived on inside him.
Friendship is a precious thing, Sayuri. One mustn’t throw it away.
Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.
A geisha has studied a man’s moods and his seasons. She fusses and he blooms.
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.
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.
Every man has his destiny. But who needs to go to a fortune-teller to find it? Do I go to a chef to find out if I’m hungry?
I’ve lived my life again just telling it to you.
My feelings of disgust had been so loud within me, they’d nearly drowned out everything else.
Some people have difficulty telling the difference between something great and something they’ve simply heard of.
Seeing him again after so long awakened something inside me. I was surprised to find myself feeling sad rather than joyful, as I would have imagined.
Was life nothing more than a storm that constantly washed away what had been there only a moment before, and left behind something barren and unrecognizable?
We all know that a winter scene, though it may be covered over one day, with even the trees dressed in shawls of snow, will be unrecognizable the following spring. Yet I never imagined such a thing could occur within our very selves.