Quotes from Memoirs of a Geisha

Arthur Golden ·  434 pages

Rating: (1.5M votes)


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


“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.”
― Arthur Golden, quote from Memoirs of a Geisha


“He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.”
― Arthur Golden, quote from Memoirs of a Geisha


“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.”
― Arthur Golden, quote from Memoirs of a Geisha


“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.”
― Arthur Golden, quote from Memoirs of a Geisha



“I dont think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.”
― Arthur Golden, quote from 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.”
― Arthur Golden, quote from Memoirs of a Geisha


“Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see. ”
― Arthur Golden, quote from Memoirs of a Geisha


“If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.”
― Arthur Golden, quote from Memoirs of a Geisha


“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, quote from Memoirs of a Geisha



“I had to wonder if men were so blinded by beauty that they would feel privileged to live their lives with an actual demon, so long as it was a beautiful demon.”
― Arthur Golden, quote from Memoirs of a Geisha


“Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.”
― Arthur Golden, quote from Memoirs of a Geisha


“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. ”
― Arthur Golden, quote from Memoirs of a Geisha


“Now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.”
― Arthur Golden, quote from Memoirs of a Geisha


“If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even a stone can be worn down with enough rain.”
― Arthur Golden, quote from 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, quote from Memoirs of a Geisha


“Water is powerful. It can wash away earth, put out fire, and even destroy iron.”
― Arthur Golden, quote from Memoirs of a Geisha


“From this experience, I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn't there. What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I'd spent every day watching for a man who would never come to me? What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realize I'd never really tasted the things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been, because I'd thought of nothing but the Chairman even while my life was drifting away from me. And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.”
― Arthur Golden, quote from Memoirs of a Geisha


“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.”
― Arthur Golden, quote from Memoirs of a Geisha


“A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course of victory.”
― Arthur Golden, quote from Memoirs of a Geisha



“We can never flee the misery that is within us.”
― Arthur Golden, quote from Memoirs of a Geisha


“If you keep your destiny in mind, every moment in life becomes an opportunity for moving closer to it.”
― Arthur Golden, quote from Memoirs of a Geisha


“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.
[Mameha]”
― Arthur Golden, quote from Memoirs of a Geisha


“Of course, a sign doesn't mean anything unless you know how to interpret it.”
― Arthur Golden, quote from Memoirs of a Geisha


“We none of us find as much kindness in this world as we should.”
― Arthur Golden, quote from Memoirs of a Geisha



“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?”
― Arthur Golden, quote from Memoirs of a Geisha


“You cannot say to the sun, 'More sun,' or to the rain, 'Less rain.' To a man, geisha can only be half a wife. We are the wives of nightfall. And yet, to learn kindness after so much unkindness, to understand that a little girl with more courage than she knew, would find her prayers were answered, can that not be called happiness? After all these are not the memoirs of an empress, nor of a queen. These are memoirs of another kind.”
― Arthur Golden, quote from Memoirs of a Geisha


“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.”
― Arthur Golden, quote from Memoirs of a Geisha


About the author

Arthur Golden
Born place: in Chattanooga, Tennessee, The United States
Born date December 6, 1956
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Popular quotes

“That’s what’s so difficult about Jesus’ call to love others. On one level, it’s easy to love God, because God doesn’t smell. God doesn’t have bad breath. God doesn’t reward kindness with evil. God doesn’t make berating comments. Loving God is easy, in this sense. But Jesus really let us have it when he attached our love for God with our love for other people.”
― Gary L. Thomas, quote from Sacred Marriage: Celebrating Marriage as a Spiritual Discipline


“Hacía pocos años que yo había perdido a Dios. Se me había roto el espejo. Dios tenía los mismos rasgos que yo le ponía y decía las palabras que yo esperaba. Mientras fui niño me puso a salvo de la duda y de la muerte. Había perdido a Dios y no me reconocía en los demás.”
― Eduardo Galeano, quote from Days and Nights of Love and War


“[There is] a widespread approach to ideas which Objectivism repudiates altogether: agnosticism. I mean this term in a sense which applies to the question of God, but to many other issues also, such as extra-sensory perception or the claim that the stars influence man’s destiny. In regard to all such claims, the agnostic is the type who says, “I can’t prove these claims are true, but you can’t prove they are false, so the only proper conclusion is: I don’t know; no one knows; no one can know one way or the other.”

The agnostic viewpoint poses as fair, impartial, and balanced. See how many fallacies you can find in it. Here are a few obvious ones: First, the agnostic allows the arbitrary into the realm of human cognition. He treats arbitrary claims as ideas proper to consider, discuss, evaluate—and then he regretfully says, “I don’t know,” instead of dismissing the arbitrary out of hand. Second, the onus-of-proof issue: the agnostic demands proof of a negative in a context where there is no evidence for the positive. “It’s up to you,” he says, “to prove that the fourth moon of Jupiter did not cause your sex life and that it was not a result of your previous incarnation as the Pharaoh of Egypt.” Third, the agnostic says, “Maybe these things will one day be proved.” In other words, he asserts possibilities or hypotheses with no jot of evidential basis.

The agnostic miscalculates. He thinks he is avoiding any position that will antagonize anybody. In fact, he is taking a position which is much more irrational than that of a man who takes a definite but mistaken stand on a given issue, because the agnostic treats arbitrary claims as meriting cognitive consideration and epistemological respect. He treats the arbitrary as on a par with the rational and evidentially supported. So he is the ultimate epistemological egalitarian: he equates the groundless and the proved. As such, he is an epistemological destroyer. The agnostic thinks that he is not taking any stand at all and therefore that he is safe, secure, invulnerable to attack. The fact is that his view is one of the falsest—and most cowardly—stands there can be.”
― Leonard Peikoff, quote from Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand


“Hospitals and jails and whores: these are the universities of life. I’ve got several degrees. Call me Mr.”
― Charles Bukowski, quote from South of No North


“Whatever man feels deeply or images clearly, is impressed upon the subconscious mind, and carried out in minutest detail.”
― quote from The Game Of Life How To Play It


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