Quotes from book

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.”

“If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.”

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

“An en is a karmic bond lasting a lifetime. Nowadays many people seem to believe their lives are entirely a matter of choice; but in my day we viewed ourselves as pieces of clay that forever show the fingerprints of everyone who has touched them.”

“Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.”

“Water is powerful. It can wash away earth, put out fire, and even destroy iron.”

“Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.”

“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?”

“Some people have difficulty telling the difference between something great and something they've simply heard of.”

“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.”

“You seemed so desperate, like you might drown if someone didn't save you.”

“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?”

“Waiting patiently doesn't suit you. I can see you have a great deal of water in your personality. Water never waits. It changes shape and flows around things, and finds the secret paths no one else has thought about.
[Mameha]”

“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.”

“It was what we Japanese called the onion life, peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while.”

“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.”

“This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes they consume us completely.”

“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.”

“Those of us with water in our personalities don't pick where we'll flow to. All we can do is flow where the landscape of our lives carries us”