Quotes from book

Memoirs of a Geisha

“Friendship is a precious thing, Sayuri. One mustn't throw it away.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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 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.”

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

“A geisha has studied a man's moods and his seasons. She fusses and he blooms.”

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

“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.”

“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 woman who acts like a fool is a fool.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.”

“All at once I felt so vain, like a girl posturing for the crowds as she walks along, only to discover the street is empty.”

“Occasionally in life we come upon things we can't understand, because we have never seen anything similar.”

“Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.”