Geisha Quotes

When I was a nursemaid at the home of the landowners, a nun who happened to pass once gave me something square and white.Timidly I licked it and discovered that it was sweet and delicious. I realize now that it must have been a sugar cube;but still, more than twenty years later, I remember clearly the joy I felt then. It's not just children; everyone seems to be deeply touched by unexpected joy brought to them by others and is unable to forget it.
That child will be grown up by now, and if he hasn't forgotten me, whenever he sees a crying child he'll want to say a kind word and wipe the kid's nose. And when that kid grows up, he'll do the same. To do something kind for another is never a bad feeling; it fosters a spirit of caring for other people. And who knows,after a hundrend years, human beings may even learn to cooperate with one another...Yes, that was it: I'd try to teach children that if they felt glad when someone gave them a single piece of candy,then they in turn should give to others. ~ Sayo Masuda

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. ~ Arthur Golden

From my opinion, 'geisha' means a woman skilled in the arts, like dancing, singing and playing musical instruments,. ~ Zhang Ziyi

[ ... ] we drank each other up with so much yearning and need that afterward I felt myself drained of all the things the Chairman had taken from me, and yet filled with all that I had taken from him. ~ Arthur Golden

What a lovely place this world would be if only people would feel affection for everyone else, and all the ugliness of the human heart were to vanish - our envy of those better off than ourselves and our scorn for those worse off. ~ Sayo Masuda

Singletons should not have to explain themselves all the time but should have an
accepted status - like geisha girls do ~ Helen Fielding

But what I could see out of the corner of my eye made me think of two lovely bundles of silk floating along a stream. In a moment they were hovering on the walkway in front of me, where they sank down and smoothed their kimono across their knees. ~ Arthur Golden

I knew even then that she was right. 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 clay that forever show the fingerprints of everyone who has touched them. Nobu's 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 Nobu would always be present. But could it really be that of 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? ~ Arthur Golden

I was really interested in geishas' work, and wanted to meet real geishas. ~ Ziyi Zhang

What I really wanted to know, though, was what it was like to be a geisha? Where do you sleep? What do you eat? How do you have your hair done? ~ Arthur Golden

Geisha because when I was living in Japan, I met a fellow whose mother was a geisha, and I thought that was kind of fascinating and ended up reading about the subject just about the same time I was getting interested in writing fiction. ~ Arthur Golden

I don't know for sure what ever became of Hatsumomo. A few years after the war, I heard she was making a living as a prostitute in the Miyagawa-cho district. She couldn't have been there long, because on the night I heard it, a man at the same party swore that if Hatsumomo was a prostitute, he would find her and give her some business of his own. He did go looking for her, but she was nowhere to be found. Over the years, she probably succeeded in drinking herself to death. She certainly wouldn't have been the first geisha to do it.

In just the way that a man can grow accustomed to a bad leg, we'd all grown accustomed to having Hatsumomo in our okiya. I don't think we quite understood all the ways her presence had afflicted us until long after she'd left, when things that we hadn't realized were ailing slowly began to heal. Even when Hatsumomo had been doing nothing more than sleeping in her room, the maids had known she was there, and that during the course of the day she would abuse them. They'd lived with the kind of tension you feel if you walk across a frozen pond whose ice might break at any moment. And as for Pumpkin, I think she'd grown to be dependent on her older sister and felt strangely lost without her.

I'd already become the okiya's principal asset, but even I took some time to weed out all the peculiar habits that had taken root because of Hatsumomo. Every time a man looked at me strangely, I found myself wondering if he'd heard something u ~ Arthur Golden

In Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata, the first of Japan's two Nobel laureates, describes the sad and sorry love affair of a geisha from the country and an intellectual from the city. It's ~ Nancy Pearl

It is confusing, because in this culture we really don't have anything that corresponds to geisha. ~ Arthur Golden

It was what we Japanese called the onion life, peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while. ~ Arthur Golden

Anyway,' she said more seriously this time, 'whatever it takes, find out what it is you're willing to suffer for. You've got to balance pleasure with pain in this life. ~ Okamoto Kanoko

We are for breeding purposes: we aren't concubines, geisha girls, courtesans. On the contrary: everything possible has been done to remove us from that category. There is supposed to be nothing entertaining about us, no room is to be permitted for the flowering of secret lusts; no special favors are to be wheedled, by them or us, there are to be no toeholds for love. We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices. So ~ Margaret Atwood

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

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

I have been presented with roles with demand not just a physical ability but mental disciplines as well. 'Memoirs of a Geisha' was not so much about physical exertion ... it was much more graceful and contained than that. ~ Michelle Yeoh

We are beautiful, but we are not weak, that old Geisha told her. Men should see us like supernatural beings. Everything is so open now. Women shave their legs in front of men, they eat with their mouth full, they drink side by side with them, they get drunk, they loose the whole essence of femininity. Being a work of art is painful, but nobody said it would be easy. To create and recreate yourself every single moment of your life, that takes commitment, passion, energy and faith. ~ Eva Scoutt

I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that 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. ~ Arthur Golden

You cannot say to the sun, 'More sun,' or to the rain, 'Less rain.' To a man, geisha can only be half a wife. We are the wives of nightfall. And yet, to learn kindness after so much unkindness, to understand that a little girl with more courage than she knew, would find her prayers were answered, can that not be called happiness? After all these are not the memoirs of an empress, nor of a queen. These are memoirs of another kind. ~ Arthur Golden

I can see you have a great deal of water in your personality. 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 the box. There's no doubt it's the most versatile of the five elements. It can wash away earth; it can put out fire; it can wear a piece of metal down and sweep it away. Even wood, which is its natural complement, can't survive without being nurtured by water. And yet, you haven't drawn on those strengths in living your life, have you? ~ Arthur Golden

Anyway I think I met him in the Swai. I was a Geisha, he was a Samurai ~ Nicki Minaj

Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper. a ~ Arthur Golden

It is a kind of geisha containment, a shutteredness, a withdrawal and negation. It's as if she is capable of sensing when people are on the point of knowing who she is and she sends them a subliminal denial. ~ Deirdre Madden

Geisha is always called beautiful even if she is not. ~ Arthur Golden

At the temple there is a poem called "Loss" carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it. ~ Arthur Golden

Martial arts is just practice. Being a geisha requires complete control. ~ Michelle Yeoh

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. ~ Arthur Golden

Thaniel wondered if real geisha painted themselves white so that it was harder to see how angry they must be all the time. ~ Natasha Pulley

Watch for the thing that will show itself to you. Because that thing, when you find it, will be your future. ~ Arthur Golden

The flat shoe makes the woman equal of men. When they have high [shoes], they play a part like a geisha, and they can't be expected to be taken that seriously. ~ Karl Lagerfeld

We don't become geisha because we want our lives to be happy; we become geisha because we have no choice. ~ Arthur Golden

I was performing my ritual of sipping tea, shooting flirtatious glances and planning murder ~ Mingmei Yip

For myself I don't like the geisha look. It's like a mask. ~ Ziyi Zhang

But she told me I was like water..Water can carve its way through stone. And when trapped, water makes a new path. ~ Arthur Golden

Waiting patiently doesn't suit you. I can see you have a great deal of water in your personality. Water never waits. It changes shape and flows around things, and finds the secret paths no one else has thought about.
[Mameha] ~ Arthur Golden

It's easy to make fun of someone like her, but i love that she doesn't apologize for herself: not even when she curses in from of me; not when people in elevators stare at her makeup style (which i'd say is pretty much geisha-meets-clown; not even when- it should be noted- she made a colossal mistake that cost her a career. She may be not very happy, but she is happy to be. It's more than i can say about myself. ~ Jodi Picoult

Being in love isn't the only way of loving. I realized with all my being that if you loved somebody- it didn't matter who it was- and dedicated yourself to bringing joy to your loved one, you, too, would be redeemed. ~ Sayo Masuda

A geisha has studied a man's moods and his seasons. She fusses and he blooms. ~ Arthur Golden

I didn't say to act dead. I said act helpless. ~ Arthur Golden

Now she took a close look at me for the first time, puffing on her pipe while the old woman beside her sighed. I didnt feel I could look at Mother directly, but I had the impression of smoke seeping out of her face like steam from a crack in the earth. I was so curious about her that my eyes took on a life of their own and began to dart about. The more I saw of her, the more fascinated I became. Her kimono was yellow, with willowy branches bearing lovely green and orange leaves; it was made of silk gauze as delicate as a spiders web. Her obi was every bit as astonishing to me. It was a lovely gauzy texture too, but heavier-looking, in russet and brown with gold threads woven through. The more I looked at her clothing, the less I was aware of standing there in that dirt corridor, or of wondering what had become of my sister and my mother and father and what would become of me. ~ Arthur Golden

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 ~ Arthur Golden

If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was. ~ Arthur Golden

When someone who's starved of love is shown something that looks like sincere affection, is it any wonder that she jumps at it and clings to it? ~ Sayo Masuda

Oh I'm sure you're right," Auntie said. "Probably she's just as you say. But she looks to me like a very clever girl, and adaptable; you can see that from the shape of her ears. ~ Arthur Golden

I don't like things held up before me that I cannot have. ~ Arthur Golden

How can we protect ourselves from a culture of manipulation, where tastes and flavors are re-created chemically in laboratories and given to us as natural food, where religion is packaged, televised and tweeted and commercials influence us to such an extent that they dictate not only what we eat, wear, read and want but what and how we dream. We need the pristine beauty of truth as revealed to us in fiction, poetry, music and the arts: we need to retrieve the third eye of imagination. ~ Azar Nafisi