One of the best things about her was that she actually acknowledged my existence.
Friendship is a precious thing, Sayuri. One mustn't throw it away.
I tried to continue, but somehow my throat made up its mind to swallow – though I can’t think what I was swallowing, unless it was a little knot of emotion I pushed back down because there was no room in my face for any more.
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.
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.
When a man takes a mistress, he doesn't turn around and divorce his wife.
But what I could see out of the corner of my eye made me think of two lovely bundles of silk floating along a stream. In a moment they were hovering on the walkway in front of me, where they sank down and smoothed their kimono across their knees.
Courage is not the absence of fear. It is feeling the fear and doing it anyway.
Men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol. The sensation is so elusive that, while they admit it is injurious, they cannot after a time differentiate the true from the false. To them, their alcoholic life seems the only normal one. They are restless, irritable, and discontented, unless they can again experience the sense of ease and comfort which comes at once by taking a few drinks-drinks which they see others taking with impunity.
Social improvement is attained more readily by a concern with the quality of results than with the purity of motives.
Knowledge is power. Power to do evil. . . or power to do good. Power itself is not evil. So knowledge itself is not evil.