#geisha

A tree may look as beautiful as ever; but when you notice the insects infesting it, and the tips of the branches that are brown from disease, even the trunk seems to lose some of its magnificence. ↗

— Arthur Golden

#beauty

At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy. ↗

— Arthur Golden

#beauty #melancholy #memoirs-of-a-geisha #beauty

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

#geisha #memoirs #change

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

— Arthur Golden

#memoirs #life

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

#geisha #heart-broken #japan #love #masuda

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

#inspirational #kindness #life #love #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

#fiction #geisha #japan #memoirs #japan

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

#eat #geisha #hair #how #i

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

— Arthur Golden

#because #confusing #corresponds #culture #geisha

For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I'd always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness-- a world in which fathers didn't sell their daughters. ↗

— Arthur Golden

#hope #imagination