“Adversity is like a strong wind. I don’t mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.

. . .

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 accomplished dancing, and the clever conversation, my life had no complexity at all, but was as simple as a stone falling toward the ground.”

—from Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden