Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Sadness was a very heavy thing.
A wounded tiger is a dangerous beast.
A woman who acts like a fool is a fool.
Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.
I didn't say to act dead. I said act helpless.
We can never flee the misery that is within us.
Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.
I've lived my life again just telling it to you.
Nothing is as bleak as the future, except the past.
Geisha is always called beautiful even if she is not.
Passion can quickly slip to jealousy, or even hatred.
Never give up; for even rivers someday wash dams away.
No one knows the author of memoir so well like himself.
I don't like things held up before me that I cannot have.
We none of us find as much kindness in this world as we should.
A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course of victory.
The prettiest of them all is a girl who is pretty on the inside.
Here again, I saw life in all its noisy excitement passing me by.
Friendship is a precious thing, Sayuri. One mustn't throw it away.
We human beings have a remarkable way of growing accustomed to things.
At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.
When a man takes a mistress, he doesn't turn around and divorce his wife.
You seemed so desperate, like you might drown if someone didn't save you.
Of course, a sign doesn't mean anything unless you know how to interpret it.
A geisha has studied a man's moods and his seasons. She fusses and he blooms.
Water is powerful. It can wash away earth, put out fire, and even destroy iron.
Time your actions so you're not fighting against the currents but moving with them.
A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.
If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.
of course the pace of change never slows, even when we've convinced ourselves it will.
I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.
He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.
Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.
Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can't put the two together.
What I had to do was keep the story within certain limits of what was, of course, plausible.
My feelings of disgust had been so loud within me, they’d nearly drowned out everything else.
When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.
It is confusing, because in this culture we really don't have anything that corresponds to geisha.
I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.
The corridor couldn't have smelled more strongly of fish guts if we had actually been inside a fish.
If you keep your destiny in mind, every moment in life becomes an opportunity for moving closer to it.
It was what we Japanese called the onion life, peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while.
I worried she might spend an afternoon chatting with me about the sights and then wish me best of luck.
We don't become geisha because we want our lives to be happy; we become geisha because we have no choice.
Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.
It's less a matter of looking the other way than of closing our eyes to what we can't stop from happening.
Occasionally in life we come upon things we can't understand, because we have never seen anything similar.
Watch for the thing that will show itself to you. Because that thing, when you find it, will be your future.
Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.
A mouse who wishes to fool the cat doesn't simply scamper out of its hole whenever it feels the slightest urge.