Quotes from Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

“If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.”

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

“I’m not sure this will make sense to you, but I felt as though I’d turned around to look in a different direction, so that I no longer faced backward toward the past, but forward toward the future. And now the question confronting me was this: What would that future be?”

“Watch for the thing that will show itself to you. Because that thing, when you find it, will be you future.”

“Of course, a sign doesn’t mean anything unless you know how to interpret it.”

“Perhaps it seems odd that a casual meeting on the street could have brought about such change. But sometimes life is like that, isn’t it? And I really do think if you’d been there to see what I saw, and felt what I felt, the same might have happened to you.”

“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 day that forever show the fingerprints of everyone who has touched them. His touch had made a deeper impression on me than most. No one could tell me whether he would be my ultimate destiny but I had always sensed the ‘en’ between us. Somewhere in the landscape of my life he would always be present. But could it really be that all the lessons I’d learned, the hardest one lay just ahead of me? Would I really have to take each of my hopes and put them away where no one would ever see them again, where not even I would ever see them?”

“I never seek to defeat the man I am fighting. 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.”

“What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I’d spent every day watching for a man who would never come to me? What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realize I’d never really tasted the things I’d eaten, or seen the places I’d been, because I’d thought of nothing but him even when my life was drifting away from me. And yet if I few my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.”

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