Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

"If he couldn't forgive you for what you'd done, it was clear to me he was never truly your destiny."

"When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency."

"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."

"Finally the homeless eel marked its territory, I suppose, and the Doctor lay heavily upon me, moist with sweat."

"Here's the thing: this eel spends its entire life trying to find a home, and what do you think women have inside them? Caves, where the eels like to live...when they find a cave they like, the wriggle around inside it for a while to be sure that...well, to be sure it's a nice cave, I suppose. And when they've made up their minds that it's comfortable, they mark the cave as their territory...by spitting."

"Even now that he is gone I have him still, in the richness of my memories. I've lived my life again just telling it to you."

"When a man takes a mistress, he doesn't turn around and divorce his wife."

"A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world."

"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 will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world."

"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"

"Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true."

"To the eyes of the American soldiers who drove past, I looked no different from the women around me; and as I thought of it, who could say I was any different? If you no longer have leaves, or bark, or roots, can you go on calling yourself a tree? "I am a peasant," I said to myself, "and not a geisha at all any longer." It was a frightening feeling to look at my hands and see their roughness. To draw my mind away from my fears, I turned my attention again to the truckloads of soldiers driving past. Weren't these the very American soldiers we'd been taught to hate, who had bombed our cities with such horrifying weapons? Now they rode through our neighborhood, throwing pieces of candy to the children."

"Friendship is a precious thing, Sayuri. One mustn't throw it away."

"After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom."

"Once when I was a little child of six or so, I watched a spider spinning its web in a corner of the house. Before the spider had even finished its job, a mosquito flew right into the web and was trapped there. The spider didn't pay it any attention at first, but went on with what it was doing; only when it was finished did it creep over on its pointy toes and sting that poor mosquito to death. As I sat there on that wooden floor and watched Hatsumomo come reaching for me with her delicate fingers, I knew I was trapped in a web she had spun for me."

"When a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom."

"I cannot tell you what it is that guides us in this life; but for me, I fell toward the Chairman just as a stone must fall toward the earth. When I cut my lip and met Mr. Tanaka, when my mother died and I was cruelly sold, it was all like a stream that falls over rocky cliffs before it can reach the ocean. Even now that he is gone I have him still, in the richness of my memories."

"I began to feel that all the people I'd ever known who had died or left me had not in fact gone away, but continued to live on inside me just as this man's wife lived on inside him."

"Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all."