Memoirs of a Geisha

by Arthur Golden

I decided our tiny house must have been offended by the ocean sneezing in its face from time to time, and took to leaning back because it wanted to get out of the way.

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 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.

Water never waits. It changes shape and flows around things, and finds the secret paths no one else has thought about—the tiny hole through the roof or the bottom of a box. There’s no doubt it’s the most versatile of the five elements.

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.

And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped about my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

I felt myself suspended in a state of quiet timelessness.

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.

We were like two wet spots in the midst of burning charcoal.

But to my surprise he brought it quickly to his lips and began kissing the inside of my wrist quite passionately, in a way I could feel as far down as my knees.

“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.”

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, and not merely as we might like to be.