Memoirs Of Geisha Quotes

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

A learned County Court judge in a book of memoirs recently said that the overwhelming amount of his time on the bench was taken up with people who are persuaded by persons whom they do not know to enter into contracts that they do not understand to purchase goods that they do not want with money that they have not got. ~ Wilfred Greene, 1st Baron Greene

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

How paltry are the traces left behind by a life, even one concentrated around those supposed things of permanence called words. We spend our time upon the earth and then disappear, and only one one-thousandth of what we were lasts. We send all those bottles out into the ocean and so few wash up on shore. ~ John Darnton

To explain the metamorphosis that takes place in the process of recovery from addiction, we have to wait for that physiological change to occur -you can't rush it, it will happen in its own time. Imagine trying to teach a caterpillar how to fly. The poor thing might listen, take flight lessons, watch butterflies darting around. But no matter how hard it tries, it won't fly. Maybe we get frustrated because we know this whole day has it in him to become a butterfly. So we give him books to read, try to counsel him, scold him, punish him, threaten him, maybe even toss him up in the air and watch his flap his little legs before crashing back to earth. The miracle takes time, we must be patient. But just as it is natural and normal for caterpillars to become butterflies, So can we expect addicted individuals, given the appropriate care and compassion, to be transformed in the recovery process. The metamorphosis is nothing short of miraculous, as people who are desperately sick are restored to health and a "normal" state of being. So don't sit around feeling sorry for yourself, be grateful that you have a disease from which you can make a full recovery. ~ Katherine Ketcham

Look at what I wrote at the beginning of this memoir. Have I caught anything at all of the extraordinary night when Paul Dempster was born? I am pretty sure that my little sketch of Percy Boyd Staunton is accurate, but what about myself? I have always sneered at autobiographies and memoirs in which the writer appears at the beginning as a charming, knowing little fellow, possessed of insights and perceptions beyond his years, yet offering these with false naivete to the reader, as though to say, 'What a little wonder I was, but All Boy.' Have the writers any notion or true collection of what a boy is?
I have and I have reinforced it by forty-five years of teaching boys. A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain - in short, a man. Oh these autobiographies in which the writer postures and simpers as a David Copperfield or a Huck Finn! False, false as harlots' oaths!
Can I write truly of my boyhood? Or will that disgusting self-love which so often attaches itself to a man's idea of his youth creep in and falsify the story? I can but try. And to begin I must give you some notion of the village in which Percy Boyd Staunton and Paul Dempster and I were born. ~ Robertson Davies

Life in the trenches has been well documented, though mostly from the point of view of the victors. Especially in the English-language literature on World War I, there is not a huge amount that captures the experiences of the ordinary German soldier. The present translation of my grandfather's memoirs of his time on the Western Front may offer some redress. ~ Gunther Simmermacher

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

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

I could make the title of my memoirs: 'It's got cinematic disaster written all over it.' ~ Peter Capaldi

I had worked for George Bush as a speechwriter, and I read a lot of White House memoirs. They all have two themes: 'It Wasn't My Fault' and 'It Would Have Been Much Worse if I Hadn't Been There.' ~ Christopher Buckley

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

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

Built-in shelves line my bedroom, adjacent to my Japanese platform bed, purchased for its capacious rim, the better to hold those books that must be immediately accessible. Yet still they pile on my nightstand, and the grid of shelves continues in floor-to-ceiling formation across the wall, stampeding over the doorway in disorderly fashion, political memoirs mixed in with literary essays, Victorian novels fighting for space with narrative adventure, the Penguin classics never standing together in a gracious row no matter how hard I try to impose order. The books compete for attention, assembling on the shelf above the sofa on the other side of the room, where they descend by the window, staring back at me. As I lie in bed with another book, they lie in wait. ~ Pamela Paul

I was too busy doing my job and living my life to spend time keeping notes for some future volume of memoirs. ~ Pierre Trudeau

But it is these four heroes, whom I will discuss from time to time in this book, whose poems, novels, stories, articles, memoirs, and encyclopedias opened my eyes to the soul of the city in which I live. For these four melancholic writers drew their strength from the tensions between the past and the present, or between what Westerners like to call East and West; they are the ones who taught me how to reconcile my love for modern art and western literature with the culture of the city in which I live. ~ Orhan Pamuk

What draws us into a story and keeps us there is the firing of our dopamine neurons, signaling that intriguing information is on the way. ~ Lisa Cron

Memoirs of the North Africa campaign attest that, fierce and brutal as much of the fighting was, relations between individual enemies retained a quality of forbearance that seems, today, almost impossible to imagine. This ~ Steven Pressfield

In the writing of memoirs, as in the production of shows, too much caution causes the audience to nod and think of other channels. ~ Gerald Clarke

All the authors who've ultimately published Louder Than Words memoirs have been very happy to be chosen and excited about the possibility of having their memoir published. Even though these books deal with serious, often painful, issues, in all cases the authors felt as though writing their story would be an empowering and healing experience. ~ Deborah Reber

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art; Annie Dillard and Cort Conley, eds., Modern American Memoirs; Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory; Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life; Phillip Lopate, ed., The Art of the Personal Essay; Jane Taylor McDonnell, Living to Tell the Tale: A Guide to Writing Memoir; and William Zinsser, ed., Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. ~ Vivian Gornick

The life we led was a proof of man's capacity for adaptation.I think that even the condemned souls in purgatory after time develop a sort of homely routine.That is ,by the way, why most prison memoirs are unreadable.The difficulty of conveying to the reader an idea of a nightmare world from which he has emerged makes the author depict the prisoner's state of mind as an uninterruped continuity of despair.He fears to appear frivolous or to spoil his effect by admitting that even in the depths of misery cheerfulness keeps breaking in. ~ Arthur Koestler

Memoirs are the backstairs of history. ~ George Meredith

When Mr. William Faraday sat down to write his memoirs after fifty-eight years of blameless inactivity he found the work of inscribing the history of his life almost as tedious as living it had been, and so, possessing a natural invention coupled with a gift for locating the easier path, he began to prevaricate a little upon the second page, working his way up to downright lying on the sixth and subsequent folios. ~ Margery Allingham

I spent the next couple of hours either walking around with a gelato in my hand or on my knees in church asking to be forgiven for the sin of gluttony. ~ Mark Leslie

I was always much impressed, in reading prison memoirs of revolutionists, such as Lenin and Trotsky ... by the amount of reading they did, the languages they studied, the range of their plans for a better social order. (Or rather, for a new social order.) In the Acts of the Apostles there are constant references to the Way and the New Man. ~ Dorothy Day

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

On resigning as collaborator on the memoirs of the former Wallis Warfield Simpson, new summaries, 6 October 1955. You can't make the Duchess of Windsor into Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. ~ Cleveland Amory

A lot of folks just get it in their head that, for instance, like writing memoirs is just easy. You just write down what happened. It doesn't quite work that way. ~ Homer Hickam

If you don't look at yourself, you can't know yourself. If you don't know your flaws, lumps and bumps then someone else can use them against you to make you feel inferior. I think you're perfect just the way you are. I believe if you hide from who you are, you let everyone else define you instead of you. You are your power, embrace that and be beautiful. ~ Ella December

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

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 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

Lightning hides the colour of night ~ Munia Khan

Human souls enfold the elemental elements that we configure to provide our own distinctive explanation of what it means to be alive. By opening our hearts and minds, by engaging in intuitive self-exploration, by telling our life stories full of prejudices and mindboggling idiosyncrasies, and by listening to the multivariate stories of our brethren, we add a ray of light to the spiraling consciousness of humankind. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster