Memoirs of a Geisha

by Arthur Golden

After this, I couldn’t hear their voices any longer; for in my ears I heard a sound like a bird’s wings flapping in panic. Perhaps it was my heart, I don’t know. But if you’ve ever seen a bird trapped inside the great hall of a temple, looking for some way out, well, that was how my mind was reacting.

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.

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

but of course we can never flee the misery that is within us.

For showing me that something besides cruelty could be found in the world, I suppose.

she seemed to regard her hair the way a train regards its smokestack: it was just the thing that happened to be on top.

You see, stage fright drains the feeling from your hands; and when you’ve already

grown accustomed to playing with hands that are numbed and miserable, stage fright presents much less of a problem.

but my mind on the eve of my debut was like a garden in which the flowers have only begun to poke their faces up through the soil, so that it is still impossible to tell how things will look.

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.

“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.”

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

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

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.