Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha
36 quotes
"It’s less a matter of looking the other way than of closing our eyes to what we can’t stop from happening."
"At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it."
"When a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom."
"After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom."
"Friendship is a precious thing, Sayuri. One mustn't throw it away."
"Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true."
"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"
"I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world."
"And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped around my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy."
"A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world."
"When a man takes a mistress, he doesn't turn around and divorce his wife."
"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."
"Here's the thing: this eel spends its entire life trying to find a home, and what do you think women have inside them? Caves, where the eels like to live...when they find a cave they like, the wriggle around inside it for a while to be sure that...well, to be sure it's a nice cave, I suppose. And when they've made up their minds that it's comfortable, they mark the cave as their territory...by spitting."
"Finally the homeless eel marked its territory, I suppose, and the Doctor lay heavily upon me, moist with sweat."
"Oh I'm sure you're right," Auntie said. "Probably she's just as you say. But she looks to me like a very clever girl, and adaptable; you can see that from the shape of her ears."
"When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency."
"If he couldn't forgive you for what you'd done, it was clear to me he was never truly your destiny."
"But, Mameha-san, I don’t want kindness!”“Don’t you? I thought we all wanted kindness. Perhaps what you mean is that you want something more than kindness. And that is something you’re in no position to ask."
"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."
"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"
"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."
"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 stumbled out into the courtyard to try to flee my misery, but of course we can never flee the misery that is within us."
"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."
"Sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier."