Memoirs of a Geisha

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.

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

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 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.

I dont think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.

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.

Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

We can never flee the misery that is within us.

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

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]

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

We none of us find as much kindness in this world as we should.

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?

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.

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.