Memoirs Of A Geisha Quotes
"Sometimes you almost make me believe your little jokes are real."
"I don't much like thinking of myself as a cup of tea made in a bucket."
"In our little fishing village of Yoroido, I lived in what I called a 'tipsy house.'"
"The fortunetellers said her eyes were so pale because of too much water in her personality."
"Water flows from place to place quickly and always finds a crack to spill through."
"Was life nothing more than a storm that constantly washed away what had been there only a moment before?"
"Do as you're told; don't be too much trouble."
"You're a nice girl, but you're one of the stupid ones."
"I'm sending you to a place where people will tell you what to do."
"I'd sooner throw myself off a cliff than spoil my chances to be a geisha like Hatsumomo."
"Hatsumomo-san, why do you stink like an ignorant girl from a fishing village?"
"Just because she can get away with it doesn't mean you can."
"I hope you're not planning to keep me waiting."
"If you want to know where your older sister is, don't make me say anything twice tonight."
"Hatsumomo has lost a bet and has to play a song on a shamisen."
"It seemed to me my chance to find my sister had come at last."
"It was exquisitely lovely—as indeed it should have been."
"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."
"I wanted to turn away from it; but I was as powerless to stop that thought from taking over my mind as the wind is to stop itself from blowing."
"Anything that made life more difficult for me only strengthened my determination to run away."
"The world was simply too cruel; how could I survive?"
"But to be a geisha... I could see it now as a stepping-stone to something else."
"We must use whatever methods we can to understand the movement of the universe around us and time our actions so that we are not fighting the currents, but moving with them."
"This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes consume us completely."
"And now the question confronting me was this: What would that future be?"
"The past was gone. My mother and father were dead and I could do nothing to change it."
"It's up to you to work hard at becoming an accomplished dancer. If you can't make it at least to the fifth rank by the age of sixteen, nothing I can do will help you."
"We human beings are only a part of something very much larger."
"You might expect that with the ornaments in her hair and the brilliant red of her lips, she should have looked proud and lovely; but I thought she looked more worried than anything else."
"The maids held Pumpkin's arms while she slipped her feet into the tall wooden shoes we call okobo, which an apprentice geisha always wears."
"When a woman walks, she should give the impression of waves rippling over a sandbar."
"I couldn't think what was the matter. And then when I got on my knees to bow to Mameha and tell her how honored I was to see her again, she paid me no attention at all."
"My goodness, she's turned into quite a young woman!"
"She wore a formal kimono of black, with the crest of the Nitta okiya."
"I felt I was someone to be taken seriously; not a girl anymore, but a young woman."
"I had no idea where we were going, but I was thrilled at the thought of being seen on the street with Mameha."
"A caterpillar has only to spin its cocoon and doze off for a while; whereas in my case, I'm sure I never had a more exhausting week."
"Every time I caught a glimpse of myself in the glass of a shop, I felt I was not a girl anymore, but a young woman to be taken seriously."
"Cash, he said, is often worth less one year than it was the year before."
"Life in Gion is hardly relaxing for the women who make a living there."
"Sadness has always seemed to me an oddly heavy thing."
"Grief is a most peculiar thing; we're so helpless in the face of it."
"A good dancer often wears her white, buttoned socks a size too small."
"The world looked different to me after mizuage."
"Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine."
"I had the sudden insight that nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine."
"I wasn't foolish enough to write down the sorts of things a geisha is never expected to reveal."
"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."
"Adversity is like a strong wind. It 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."
"Everyone knows that a wounded tiger is a dangerous beast."
"When you want to break a board, cracking it in the middle is only the first step. Success comes when you bounce up and down with all your weight until the board snaps in half."
"Nothing is bleaker than the future, except perhaps the past."
"We can't waste our time thinking about such things."
"Poor Hatsumomo! It must be just as the doctor said. She really does seem to be losing her mind."
"Nothing is so unpredictable as who will survive a war and who won't."
"You might say that by about the middle of 1943 we all realized the waves were simply too big for our craft."
"But when we feel pain, even the blossoming trees seem weighted with suffering to us."
"We don't become geisha because we want our lives to be happy; we become geisha because we have no choice."
"Sometimes I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see."
"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."
"You must take care, Sayuri, never to expect too much."
"When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency."
"I began to feel like a tree whose roots had at last broken into the rich, wet soil deep beneath the surface."
"In banishing Nobu from my life forever, it wasn't just that I lost his friendship; I also ended up banishing myself from Gion."
"I'm sure most of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it."
"I fell into a sound sleep and dreamed that I was at a banquet back in Gion, talking with an elderly man who was explaining to me that his wife, whom he'd cared for deeply, wasn't really dead because the pleasure of their time together lived on inside him."