If you'd asked me why I wanted these things, I would have answered, why does a ripe persimmon taste delicious? Why does wood smell smoky when it burns?.A tree may look as beautiful as ever, but when you notice insects infesting it, and the tips of the branches that are brown from disease even the trunk seems to lose some of its magnificence.(Of Hatsumomo) She was like a fabric taken from its warm closet and hung out of doors where the harsh weather will gradually consume it.He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.Everything around me seemed to grow so quiet, as if he were the wind that blew and I were just a cloud carries upon it.I felt as the waves of the ocean must feel when clouds have blocked the warmth of the sun.I felt as a simple smelt must feel when a silver salmon glides by.If you have experienced an evening more exciting than any in life, you're sad to see it end, and yet you still feel grateful that it happened.Occasionally in life we come upon things we can't understand because we have never seen anything similar.Dreams can be such dangerous things they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes consume us completely.Being sent out into the world isn't necessarily the same as leaving your home behind you.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.I felt as a bird must feel when it has flown across the ocean and comes upon a creature that knows its nest.

Sourced Narrator (Sayuri as an elderly woman) 1.1 Narrator (Sayuri as an elderly woman).

Memoires of a geisha