Arthur Golden, Memoirs Of A Geisha Quotes
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.
After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.
The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.
If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.
I stumbled out into the courtyard to try to flee my misery, but of course we can never flee the misery that is within us.
When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.
Can't you see? Every step I have taken, since I was that child on the bridge, has been to bring myself closer to you.
And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped around my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.
At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it.
Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.
I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.
Watch for the thing that will show itself to you. Because that thing, when you find it, will be your future.
Perhaps it seems odd that a casual meeting on the street could have brought about such change. But sometimes life is like that isn't it
My tears simply broke through the fragile wallthat had held them, and with a terrible feeling of shame, I laid my head upon the table and let them drain out of me.
Of course, a sign doesn't mean anything unless you know how to interpret it.
Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.
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.
Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.
A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.
When a man takes a mistress, he doesn't turn around and divorce his wife.
Friendship is a precious thing, Sayuri. One mustn't throw it away.
Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.
If he couldn't forgive you for what you'd done, it was clear to me he was never truly your destiny.
I would've had an easier time if my emotions had all pulled me in the same direction, but it wasn't so simple. I'd been blown about like a scrap of paper in the wind.
Sometimes, " he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.
When I said these words, all the heat in my body seemed to rise to my face. I felt I might float up into the air, just like a piece of ash from a fire.
Sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier.
It’s less a matter of looking the other way than of closing our eyes to what we can’t stop from happening.
Even now that he is gone I have him still, in the richness of my memories. I've lived my life again just telling it to you.
And when I raised myself to look at the man who’d spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall.
When a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.
