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2182aa6
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In the instant before the door opened, I could almost sense my life expanding just like a river whose waters have begun to swell; for I had never before taken such a drastic step to change the course of my own future. I was like a child tiptoeing along a precipice overlooking the sea. And yet somehow I hadn't imagined a great wave might come and strike me there, and wash everything away.
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Arthur Golden |
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7f8fff5
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Nothing is bleaker than the future, except perhaps the past.
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Arthur Golden |
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40a55ee
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As a young girl I believed my life would never have been a struggle if Mr.Tanaka hadn't torn me away from my tipsy house. But now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.
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Arthur Golden |
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3535387
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The moment I formulated this thought, everything aroud me seemed to droop heavily toward the earth. Outside in the garden, the eaves of the roof dripped rain like beads of weighted glass. Even the mats themselves seemed to press down upon the floor. I remember thinking that I was dacing to express not the pain of a young woman who has lost her supernatural lover, but the pain I myself would feel when my life was finally robbed of the one th..
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Arthur Golden |
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d8f6039
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Every step I have taken has been to bring myself closer to you.
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Arthur Golden |
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4042069
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I understood that he left me at the end of his long life just as naturally as the leaves fall from the trees.
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life
tree
leaves
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Arthur Golden |
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7036c4f
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Passion can quickly slip over into jealousy, or even hatred.
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Arthur Golden |
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961d9e8
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When a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.
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stone
water
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Arthur Golden |
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293e192
|
After this, I couldn't hear their voices any longer; for in my ears I heard a sound like a bird's wings flapping in panic. Perhaps it was my heart, I don't know. But if you've ever seen a bird trapped inside the great hall of a temple, looking for some way out, well, that was how my mind was reacting. It had never occurred to me that my mother wouldn't simply go on being sick. I won't say I'd never wondered what might happen if she should d..
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Arthur Golden |
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c8a2981
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And suddenly everything around me seemed to grow quiet, as if he were the wind that blew and I were just a cloud carried upon it.
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love
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Arthur Golden |
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d18258c
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It's your duty to use what influence you have, unless you want to drift through life like a fish belly-up on the stream" "I wish I could believe that life really is something more than a stream that carries us along, belly-up" "Alright, if it's a stream, you're still free to be in this part of it or that part, aren't you? The water will divide again and again. If you bump, and tussle, and fight, and make use of whatever advantages you might..
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life
stream
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Arthur Golden |
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9020c51
|
Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.
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memoirs-of-geisha
sayuri
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Arthur Golden |
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9117258
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Here again, I saw life in all its noisy excitement passing me by.
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Arthur Golden |
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fd589d4
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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. There's no doubt it's the most versatile of the five elements. It can wash away earth it can put fire it can wear a piece of metal down and sweep it away. And yet, you haven't drawn on those strengths in living your life, Have you?
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Arthur Golden |
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b4d576d
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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 the future be
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geisha
memoirs
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Arthur Golden |
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16ebad8
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Finally the homeless eel marked its territory, I suppose, and the Doctor lay heavily upon me, moist with sweat.
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virginity
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Arthur Golden |
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d3c5d81
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If Mother and Mameha couldn't come to an agreement, I would remain a maid all my life just as surely as a turtle remains a turtle
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Arthur Golden |
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39bbc40
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It was an evening of torment, and I remember only one other thing about it. At some point after everyone was asleep, I wandered away from the inn in a daze and ended up on the sea cliffs, staring out into the darkness with sound of the roaring water below me. The thundering of the ocean was like a bitter lament. I seemed to see beneath everything a layering of cruelty I have never known was there. The howling of the wind and shaking of the ..
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Arthur Golden |
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d0eb5d4
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Some times we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.
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Arthur Golden |
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0a8d036
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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 u..
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hopes
destiny
memoirs-of-a-geisha
geisha
clay
impression
memoirs
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Arthur Golden |
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c155797
|
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."
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fiction
geisha
memoirs
japan
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Arthur Golden |
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4f5595c
|
My tears simply broke through the fragile wall that had held them, and with a terrible feeling of shame, I laid my head upon the table and let them drain out of me.
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sadness
love
tears
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Arthur Golden |
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f3b11ff
|
Memoirs give the knowledge about the author and his environment. They are different from biography. Memoirs do not get ahead, and the man who writes a biography looks at his future like at a very simple thing.
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Arthur Golden |
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9aa47fc
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nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.
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Arthur Golden |
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9447bf5
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I wasn't thanking him for the coin, or even for the trouble he'd taken in stopping to help me. I was thanking him for... well, for something I'm not sure I can explain even now. For showing me that something besides cruelty could be found in the world, I suppose.
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life
love
signs
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Arthur Golden |
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6589ad5
|
I felt I was standing on a stage many hours after the dance had ended, when the silence lay as heavily upon the empty theater as a blanket of snow.
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Arthur Golden |
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bf75c8a
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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. If I'd never met Mr. Tanaka, my life would have been a simple stream flowing from our tipsy house to the ocean. Mr. Tanaka changed all that when he sent me out into the world.
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Arthur Golden |
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479aeb6
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Hatsumomo's lovely smille grew... until her lips were as rich and full as drops of blood beading at the edge of a wound
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Arthur Golden |
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d1c200a
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Sadness was a very heavy thing.
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Arthur Golden |
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12848ec
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Isn't there one thing I can ask of you that you won't disregard?. . . . You could just reply, "Yes, Baron," and be done with it.' Yes, Baron."
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Arthur Golden |
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c40d32d
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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..
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nature
|
Arthur Golden Memoirs of a Geisha |
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b696ceb
|
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 succee..
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sayuri
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Arthur Golden |
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5ccfaca
|
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.
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memories
quote
richness
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Arthur Golden |
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bfa0f47
|
No one knows the author of memoir so well like himself.
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Arthur Golden |
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7d58d93
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You're eighteen years old, Sayuri," she went on. "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." "But, Mameha-san, how cruel!" "Yes, it is cruel," she said. "But none of us can escape destiny." "Please, it isn't a matter of escaping my destiny, or anything of that sort. Nobu-san is a good..
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Arthur Golden |
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f0eb6a5
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Grief is a most peculiar thing; we're so helpless in the face of it.
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Arthur Golden |
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cd312c7
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Even stone can be worn down with enough rain
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Arthur Golden |
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670d546
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Every time I caught a glimpse of myself in the glass of a shop, I felt I was someone to be taken seriously; not a girl anymore, but a young woman.
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Arthur Golden |
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c2baa1a
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But, Mameha-san, I don't want kindness!" "Don't you? I thought we all wanted kindness. Perhaps what you mean is that you want something more than kindness. And that is something you're in no position to ask."
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kindness
life
love
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Arthur Golden |
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95b44d4
|
Chairman: "Sometimes", he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see."
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Arthur Golden |
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8c3e194
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The very idea!" he said, with another big laugh. "You, growing up in a dump like Yoroido. That's like making tea in a bucket!"
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Arthur Golden |
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6b1a8b0
|
A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.
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memoir
memory
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Arthur Golden |
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5ef12c0
|
Whatever any of us may have thought about Hatsumomo, she was like an empress in our okiya since she earned the income be which we all lived. And being an empress she would have been very displeased, upon returning late at night, to find her palace dark and all the servants asleep. That is to say, when she came home too drunk to unbutton her socks, someone had to unbutton them for her; and if she felt hungry, she certainly wasn't going to st..
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Arthur Golden |
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1d22ef6
|
He stood with his two frail hands on his cane and his eyes closed, and breathed in deeply the scent of the past. "Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see."
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remembering
reminiscence
|
Arthur Golden |