Arthur Golden’s “Memoirs of a Geisha” Quotes (62 Quotes)

Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.

I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.

Of course, a sign doesn't mean anything unless you know how to interpret it.

Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.

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.

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

You seemed so desperate, like you might drown if someone didn't save you.

Geisha is always called beautiful even if she is not.

I was thanking him for...well, for something I'm not sure I can explain even now. For showing me that something besides cruelty could be found in the world, I suppose.

Seeing him again after so long awakened something inside me. I was surprised to find myself feeling sad rather than joyful, as I would have imagined.

Grief is a most peculiar thing; we're so helpless in the face of it. It's like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.

I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulling me down toward them.

Some people have difficulty telling the difference between something great and something they've simply heard of.

A geisha has studied a man's moods and his seasons. She fusses and he blooms.

He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.

If Mother and Mameha couldn't come to an agreement, I would remain a maid all my life just as surely as a turtle remains a turtle

Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.

A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course of victory.

Here's the thing: this eel spends its entire life trying to find a home, and what do you think women have inside them? Caves, where the eels like to live...when they find a cave they like, the wriggle around inside it for a while to be sure that...well, to be sure it's a nice cave, I suppose. And when they've made up their minds that it's comfortable, they mark the cave as their territory...by spitting.

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

The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.

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.

His face was very heavily creased, and into each crease he had tucked some worry or other, so that it wasn't really his face any longer, but more like a tree that had nests of birds in all of the branches. He had to struggle constantly to manage it and always looked worn out from the effort.

If you have experienced an evening more exciting than any in your life, you're sad to see it end; and yet you still feel grateful that it happened.

This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes they consume us completely.

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.

How many times already had I encountered the painful lesson that although we may wish for the barb to be pulled from our flesh, it leaves a welt that doesn't heal?

If you keep your destiny in mind, every moment in life becomes an opportunity for moving closer to it.

Those of us with water in our personalities don't pick where we'll flow to. All we can do is flow where the landscape of our lives carries us

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

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.

In the instant before the door opened, I could almost sense my life expanding just like a river whose waters have begun to swell; for I had never before taken such a drastic step to change the course of my own future. I was like a child tiptoeing along a precipice overlooking the sea. And yet somehow I hadn't imagined a great wave might come and strike me there, and wash everything away.

Waiting patiently doesn't suit you. I can see you have a great deal of water in your personality. Water never waits. It changes shape and flows around things, and finds the secret paths no one else has thought about.

All at once I felt so vain, like a girl posturing for the crowds as she walks along, only to discover the street is empty.

I cannot tell you what it is that guides us in this life; but for me, I fell toward the Chairman just as a stone must fall toward the earth. When I cut my lip and met Mr. Tanaka, when my mother died and I was cruelly sold, it was all like a stream that falls over rocky cliffs before it can reach the ocean. Even now that he is gone I have him still, in the richness of my memories.

It was what we Japanese called the onion life, peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while.

Was life nothing more than a storm that constantly washed away what had been there only a moment before, and left behind something barren and unrecognizable?

All my hard work in overhearing it was it was about as rewarding to me as a man who lugs a chest up the hill only to learn that its full of rocks.

I could no more have stopped myself from feeling that sadness than you could stop yourself from smelling an apple that has been cut open on the table before you.

I've lived my life again just telling it to you.

Watch for the thing that will show itself to you. Because that thing, when you find it, will be your future.

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.

I didn't say to act dead. I said act helpless.

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.

Water is powerful. It can wash away earth, put out fire, and even destroy iron.

Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us-so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe.

I don't know when we'll see each other again or what the world will be like when we do. We may both have seen many horrible things. But I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.

My feelings of disgust had been so loud within me, they'd nearly drowned out everything else.

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