Memoirs of a Geisha Quotes

“I don’t think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Every time I caught a glimpse of myself in the glass of a shop, I felt I was someone to be taken seriously; not a girl anymore, but a young woman.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Suppose that you and I were sitting in a quiet room overlooking a garden, chatting and sipping at our cups of green tea while we talked about something that had happened a long while ago, and I said to you, “That afternoon when I met so-and-so . . . was the very best afternoon of my life, and also the very worst afternoon.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“I've often observed that men and women who were young children during these years [of defeat in war] have a certain seriousness about them; there was too little laughter in their childhoods.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Now, Chiyo, stumbling along in life is a poor way to proceed. You must learn how to find the time and place for things.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“When I was in the street throwing a beanbag with the other children and Mr. Tanaka happened to stroll out of the seafood company, I always stopped what I was doing to watch him.
I lay there on that slimy table while Mr. Tanaka examined my lip, pulling it down with his fingers and tipping my head this way and that. All at once he caught sight of my gray eyes, which were fixed on his face with such fascination, I couldn't pretend I hadn't been staring at him. He didn't give me a sneer, as if to say that I was an impudent girl, and he didn't look away as if it made no difference where I looked or what I thought. We stared at each other for a long moment-so long it gave me a chill even there in the muggy air of the seafood company.
"I know you," he said at last. "You're old Sakamoto's little girl."
Even as a child I could tell that Mr. Tanaka saw the world around him as it really was; he never wore the dazed look of my father. To me, he seemed to see the sap bleeding from the trunks of the pine trees, and the circle of brightness in the sky where the sun was smothered by clouds. He lived in the world that was visible, even if it didn't always please him to be there. I knew he noticed the trees, and the mud, and the children in the street, but I had no reason to believe he'd ever noticed me.
Perhaps this is why when he spoke to me, tears came stinging to my eyes.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes consume us completely.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Llevamos nuestras vidas como el agua que corre colina abajo, más o menos en una dirección, hasta que damos con algo que nos obliga a encontrar un nuevo curso.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“¿Es que la vida era sólo una tempestad que arrasaba con todo, dejando tras ella sólo algo yermo e irreconocible?”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“I watched him walk away with sickness in my heart—though it was a pleasing kind of sickness, if such a thing exists. I mean to say that 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. In that brief encounter with the Chairman, I had changed from a lost girl facing a lifetime of emptiness to a girl with purpose in her life. 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? And I really do think if you’d been there to see what I saw, and feel what I felt, the same might have happened to you.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“I lived in that contented state a long while before I was finally able to look back and admit how desolate my life had once been. I’m sure I could never have told my story otherwise; I don’t think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“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.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“If we rub a fabric too often, it will quickly grow threadbare; and Nobu’s words had rasped against me so much, I could no longer maintain that finely lacquered surface Mameha had always counseled me to hide behind.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Grief is a most peculiar thing; we're so helpless in the face of it.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“You're eighteen years old, Sayuri," she went on. "Neither you nor I can know your destiny. You may
never know it! Destiny isn't always like a party at the end of the evening. Sometimes it's nothing more
than struggling through life from day to day."
"But, Mameha-san, how cruel!"
"Yes, it is cruel," she said. "But none of us can escape destiny."
"Please, it isn't a matter of escaping my destiny, or anything of that sort. Nobu-san is a good man, just as
you say. I know I should feel nothing but gratitude for his interest, but . . . there are so many things I've
dreamed about."
"And you're afraid that once Nobu has touched you, after that they can never be? Really, Sayuri, what
did you think life as a geisha would be like? We don't become geisha so our lives will be satisfying. We
become geisha because we have no other choice."
"Oh, Mameha-san . . . please . . . have I really been so foolish to keep my hopes alive that perhaps one
day-"
"Young girls hope all sorts of foolish things, Sayuri. Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear
too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“ich so sehr eine Konkurrenz für Dich, wie eine Pfütze als Meer gilt”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Tuga je vrlo neobičan osjećaj, tako smo bespomoćni kad se s njome suočimo. To je nešto poput prozora koji se otvara po vlastitoj volji. Soba se hladi, a mi možemo samo bespomoćno drhtati.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Whatever any of us may have thought about Hatsumomo, she was like an empress in our okiya since she earned the income be which we all lived. And being an empress she would have been very displeased, upon returning late at night, to find her palace dark and all the servants asleep. That is to say, when she came home too drunk to unbutton her socks, someone had to unbutton them for her; and if she felt hungry, she certainly wasn't going to stroll into the kitchen and prepare something by herself--such as an umeboshi ochazuke, which was a favorite snack of hers, made with leftover rice and pickled sour plums, soaked in hot tea. Actually our okiya wasn't at all unusual in this respect. The job of waiting up to bow and welcome the geisha home almost always fell to the most junior of the "cocoons"--as the young geisha-in-training were often called. And from the moment I began taking lessons at the school, the most junior cocoon in our okiya was me. Long before midnight, Pumpkin and the two elderly maids were sound asleep on their futons only a meter or so away on the wood floor of the entrance hall; but I had to go on kneeling there, struggling to stay awake until sometimes as late as two o'clock in the morning. Granny's room was nearby and she slept with her light on and her door opened a crack. The bar of light that fell across my empty futon made me think of a day, not long before Satsu [Chiyo's sister] and I were taken away from our village, when I'd peered into the back room of our house to see my mother asleep there. My father had draped fishing nets across the paper screens to darken the room, but it looked so gloomy I decided to open one of the windows; and when I did, a strip of bright sunlight fell across my mother's futon and showed her hand so pale and bony. To see the yellow lights streaming from Granny's room onto my futon...I had to wonder if my mother was still alive. We ere so much alike, I felt sure I would have known if she'd died; but of course, I'd had no sign one way or the other.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Neću reći da sam imala prirođenog dara za ples ili za bilo što drugo, ali sam zasigurno bila spremna uporno raditi dok ne postignem cilj.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“I was hardly worthy of these surroundings.
And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped about my
body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty
itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“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. If I'd never met Mr. Tanaka, my life would have been a simple stream flowing from our tipsy house to the ocean. Mr. Tanaka changed all that when he sent me out into the world. But being sent out into the world isn't necessarily the same as leaving your home behind you. I'd been in Gion more than six months by the time I received Mr. Tanaka's letter; and yet during that time, I'd never for a moment given up the belief that I would one day find a better life elsewhere, with at least part of the family I'd always known. I was living only half in Gion; the other half of me lived in my dreams of going home. This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes consume us completely.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“I must tell you something about necks in Japan, if you don't know it; namely, that Japanese men, as a rule, feel about a woman's neck and throat the same way that men in the West might feel about a woman's legs. This is why geisha wear the collars of their kimono so low in the back that the first few bumps of the spine are visible; I suppose it's like a woman in Paris wearing a short skirt. Auntie painted onto the back of Hatsumomo's neck a design called sanbon-ashi-"three legs." It makes a very dramatic picture, for you feel as if you're
looking at the bare skin of the neck through little tapering points of a white fence. It was years before I understood the erotic effect it has on men; but in a way, it's like a woman peering out from between her fingers. In fact, a geisha leaves a tiny margin of skin bare all around the hairline, causing her makeup to look even more artificial, something like a mask worn in Noh drama. When a man sits beside her and sees her makeup like a mask, he becomes that much more aware of the bare skin beneath.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“I won't say I'd never wondered what might happen if she should die; I did wonder about it, in the same way I wondered what might happen if our house were swallowed up in an earthquake. There could hardly be life after such an event.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“People in the village often said she ought to have been extremely attractive, because her parents had been. Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can't put the two together; this was the terrible trick nature had played on her.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“My existence was as unstable as a stream, changing in every way; but the moth was like a piece of stone, changing not at all.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“When I unwrapped the moth from its funeral shroud, it was the same startlingly lovely creature as on the day I had entombed it. Everything about it seemed beautiful and perfect, and so utterly unchanged.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“I never seek to defeat the man I am fighting,” he explained. “I seek to defeat his confidence. A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course to victory. Two men are equals—true equals—only when they both have equal confidence.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Zar život nije ništa drugo do oluja koja stalno odnosi ono što je još samo trenutak ranije bilo tu i ostavlja za sobom tek nešto ogoljelo i neprepoznatljivo?”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“another motive as well—namely, to preserve her voice, which had a quality of expressiveness I have rarely encountered. Customarily she spoke with a soft tone, as one might expect of a woman who has made a career of entertaining men.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“that droplet of moisture that had slipped from me like a tear seemed almost to tell the story of my life. It fell through empty space, with no control whatsoever over its destiny; rolled along a path of silk; and somehow came to rest there on the teeth of that dragon. I thought of the petals I’d thrown into the Kamo River shallows outside Mr. Arashino’s workshop, imagining they might find their way to the Chairman. It seemed to me that, somehow, perhaps they had.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha