Memories Of A Geisha Quotes

Watch for the thing that will show itself to you. Because that thing, when you find it, will be your future.

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.

Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.

Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can't put the two together.

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.

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

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.

Sadness was a very heavy thing.

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.

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

I don't like things held up before me that I cannot have.

I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.

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.

We don't become geisha because we want our lives to be happy; we become geisha because we have no choice.

At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

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.

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

I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.

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.

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.

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

His face was very heavily creased, and into each crease he had tucked some worry or other, so that it wasn't really his face any longer, but more like a tree that had nests of birds in all of the branches. He had to struggle constantly to manage it and always looked worn out from the effort.

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.

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?

How many times already had I encountered the painful lesson that although we may wish for the barb to be pulled from our flesh, it leaves a welt that doesn't heal?

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

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.

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.