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.
Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can't put the two together.
A wounded tiger is a dangerous beast.
It's less a matter of looking the other way than of closing our eyes to what we can't stop from happening.
Water is powerful. It can wash away earth, put out fire, and even destroy iron.
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.
A geisha has studied a man's moods and his seasons. She fusses and he blooms.
What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realized I'd never really tasted to things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been. What life would I have? I would be like the dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.
If you have experienced an evening more exciting than any in your life, you're sad to see it end; and yet you still feel grateful that it happened.
I fell into a sound sleep and dreamed that I was at a banquet back in Gion, talking with an elderly man who was explaining to me that his wife, whom he'd cared for deeply, wasn't really dead because the pleasure of their time together lived on inside him.
I didn't say to act dead. I said act helpless.
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 a 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?
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.
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.
Neither you nor I can know your destiny. You may never know it! Destiny isn't always like a party at the end of the evening. Sometimes it's nothing more than struggling through life from day to day.
of course the pace of change never slows, even when we've convinced ourselves it will.
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.
From this experience, I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn't there. 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 the Chairman even while my life was drifting away from me. And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.
By the time we arrived, as evening was approaching, I felt as sore as a rock must feel when the waterfall has pounded on it all day long.
Time your actions so you're not fighting against the currents but moving with them.
If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.
I don't like things held up before me that I cannot have.
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.
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