The best quotes by the author we have brought to you
“A teahouse isn’t for tea, you see; it’s the place where men go to be entertained by geisha.” (Memoirs of a Geisha Quotes)
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“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.”
Arthur Golden
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
Memoirs of a Geisha
“And suddenly everything around me seemed to grow quiet, as if he were the wind that blew and I were just a cloud carried upon it.”
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
“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.”
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.”
Arthur Golden
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
Memoirs of a Geisha
“How curious it is, what the future brings us. You must take care, never to expect too much.”
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“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.”
Arthur Golden
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
Memoirs of a Geisha
“I expect you to go through life with your eyes open! If you keep your destiny in mind, every moment in life becomes an opportunity for moving closer to it.”
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“I felt I was standing on a stage many hours after the dance had ended, when the silence lay as heavily upon the empty theater as a blanket of snow.”
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“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.”
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“I understood that he left me at the end of his long life just as naturally as the leaves fall from the trees.”
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“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.”
Arthur GoldenMemoirs of a Geisha
“I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.”
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“I’m not sure this will make sense to you but I felt as though I’d turned around to look in a different direction so that I no longer faced backward toward the past but forward toward the future. And now the question confronting me was this: What would the future be”
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“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.”
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“It was what we Japanese called the onion life, peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while.”
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“It’s your duty to use what influence you have, unless you want to drift through life like a fish belly-up on the stream”
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“My feelings of disgust had been so loud within me, they’d nearly drowned out everything else.”
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“My tears simply broke through the fragile wall that had held them, and with a terrible feeling of shame, I laid my head upon the table and let them drain out of me.”
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“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.”
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“Now, stumbling along in life is a poor way to proceed. You must learn how to find the time and place for things. A mouse who wishes to fool the cat doesn’t simply scamper out of its hole when it feels the slightest urge.”
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“Occasionally in life we come upon things we can’t understand, because we have never seen anything similar.”
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“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
Memoirs of a Geisha
“Passion can quickly slip over into jealousy, or even hatred.”
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“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”
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“Sadness was a very heavy thing.”
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“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.”
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“Some people have difficulty telling the difference between something great and something they’ve simply heard of.”
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“Some times we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.”
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“Watch for the thing that will show itself to you. Because that thing, when you find it, will be your future.”
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“We don’t become geisha because we want our lives to be happy; we become geisha because we have no choice.”
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.”
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“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
Memoirs of a Geisha
“When a geisha wakes up in the morning she is just like any other woman. Her face may be greasy from sleep, and her breath unpleasant. It may be true that she wears a startling hairstyle even as she struggles to open her eyes; but in every other respect she’s a woman like any other, and not a geisha at all. Only when she sits before her mirror to apply her makeup with care does she become a geisha. And I don’t mean that this is when she begins to look like one. This is when she begins to think like one too.”
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.”
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“You seemed so desperate, like you might drown if someone didn’t save you.”
Arthur Golden
Memoirs of a Geisha
“Young girls hope all sorts of foolish things. 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
