Geisha is always called beautiful even if she is not.

Never give up; for even rivers someday wash dams away.

We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.

By the time we arrived, as evening was approaching, I felt as sore as a rock must feel when the waterfall has pounded on it all day long.

I worried she might spend an afternoon chatting with me about the sights and then wish me best of luck.

After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.

I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.

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

At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

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.

If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.

Traveling in other countries is especially fun because others often attribute your differences to the less-stigmatizing idea that you're like this only because you're a foreigner.

I think what weakens people most is fear of wasting their strength.

We need a top-to-bottom review of every economic development and assistance program we have to ensure that they encourage everyone to strive instead of settle, because there is dignity in all work.

But there is, I have learned, no permanent escape from the past. It may be an unrecognized law of our nature that we should be drawn back, inevitably, to the place where we have suffered most.

Ask me, it's a sin to pervert faith with religion. Despite every church, mosque, & synagogue in it, this is not the world any God worth his salt would have created.

There is no salvation anywhere. The idea of salvation implies the idea of an absolute.

School improvement is not a mystery. Incremental, even dramatic improvement is not only possible but probable under the right conditions.

Life is deeply tragic and also very comic at the same time. It's everything at once.

The vamp in McMann’s stared at me. I guess he didn’t like the Goth look. Most of them don’t; somehow they think I’m making fun of them. Which I totally am.

Low self esteem involves imagining the worst that other people can think about you.