Memoirs of a Geisha

by Arthur Golden

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

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?

“Bear up, Chiyo, bear up. There’s nothing more any of us can do in this world.”

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.

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

A mouse who wishes to fool the cat doesn’t simply scamper out of its hole when it feels the slightest urge.

We human beings are only a part of something very much larger. When we walk along, we may crush a beetle or simply cause a change in the air so that a fly ends up where it might never have gone otherwise. And if we think of the same example but with ourselves in the role of the insect, and the larger universe in the role we’ve just played, it’s perfectly clear that we’re affected every day by forces over which we have no more control than the poor beetle has over our gigantic foot as it descends upon it.

a winter scene, though it may be covered over one day, with even the trees dressed in shawls of snow, will be unrecognizable the following spring.

It was as if the little girl named Chiyo, running barefoot from the pond to her tipsy house, no longer existed. I felt that this new girl, Sayuri, with her gleaming white face and her red lips, had destroyed her.

Black swans glided across the pond with a bearing so proud they made me feel ashamed to be such an ungainly creature as a human being.

when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.

“A hundred yen is a hundred yen, whether it comes from this man or that one.”

A shopkeeper who leaves his window open can hardly be angry at the rainstorm for ruining his wares.

He was a small man; but keep in mind that a stick of dynamite is small too.

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.

“Nothing is bleaker than the future, except perhaps the past.”

If you no longer have leaves, or bark, or roots, can you go on calling yourself a tree?

“I hope you won’t mind my asking—” “Ask,” she said.

when we feel pain, even the blossoming trees seem weighted with suffering to us;

There was a certain very startling taste, as distinctive as any fruit or sweet, and when I tasted it, my shoulders sagged and my stomach swelled up; because for some reason it called to mind a dozen different scenes I couldn’t think why I should remember. I thought of the head of steam when the cook lifted the lid from the rice cooker in the kitchen of our okiya. I saw a picture in my mind of the little alleyway that was the main thoroughfare of Pontocho, as I’d seen it one evening crowded with well-wishers after Kichisaburo’s last performance, the day he’d retired from the Kabuki theater. I’m sure I might have thought of a hundred other things, for it was as if all the boundaries in my mind had broken down and my memories were running free.

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.