Quotes & Sayings About Geisha

The paradox of a woman, as a thin line separates the beauty from the ugly
the beauty charms, so does the ugliness in its own ways that are myriad.
The piousness will not shout about its nicety, prettiness of heart is reality
for a discerning eye, there won't be a problem any; but for the loose hearted.

Priest versus Geisha — Taranum

Martial arts is just practice. Being a geisha requires complete control. — Michelle Yeoh

Geisha is always called beautiful even if she is not. — Arthur Golden

What a lovely place this world would be if only people would feel affection for everyone else, and all the ugliness of the human heart were to vanish - our envy of those better off than ourselves and our scorn for those worse off. — Sayo Masuda

We topped the ridge a few moments later, and the town of Senzuru came into view below us. The day was drab, everything in shades of gray. It was my first look at the world outside Yoroido, and I didn't think I'd missed much. I could see the thatched roofs of the town around an inlet, amid dull hills, and beyond them the metal-colored sea, broken with shards of white. Inland, the landscape might have been attractive but for the train tracks running across it like a scar. - Chapter 2, pg 20 — Arthur Golden

For myself I don't like the geisha look. It's like a mask. — Ziyi Zhang

Happily I didn't see her after she'd died, except for her legs, which were visible from the doorway and looked like slender tree limbs wrapped in wrinkled silk. - Chapter 10, pg 124 — Arthur Golden

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

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

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. — Arthur Golden

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

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

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 us. Somewhere in the landscape of my life Nobu would always be present. But could it really be that of all the lessons I'd learned, the hardest one lay just ahead of me? Would I really have to take each of my hopes and put them away where no one would ever see them again, where not even I would ever see them? — Arthur Golden

If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was. — Arthur Golden

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 the 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? — Arthur Golden

I have been presented with roles with demand not just a physical ability but mental disciplines as well. 'Memoirs of a Geisha' was not so much about physical exertion ... it was much more graceful and contained than that. — Michelle Yeoh

It's easy to make fun of someone like her, but i love that she doesn't apologize for herself: not even when she curses in from of me; not when people in elevators stare at her makeup style (which i'd say is pretty much geisha-meets-clown; not even when- it should be noted- she made a colossal mistake that cost her a career. She may be not very happy, but she is happy to be. It's more than i can say about myself. — Jodi Picoult

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. — Arthur Golden

The first rule that a geisha is taught, at the age of nine, is to be charming to other women ... Every girl in the world should have geisha training. — Diana Vreeland

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

Your powers of observation are formidable, Michael says and Darien giggles behind one perfectly manicured hand, like some sort of preppie geisha. — Stephanie Wardrop

I studied Japanese language and culture in college and graduate school, and afterward went to work in Tokyo, where I met a young man whose father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha. He and I never discussed his parentage, which was an open secret, but it fascinated me. — Arthur Golden

Anyway I think I met him in the Swai. I was a Geisha, he was a Samurai — Nicki Minaj

This diary will tell the real life story of my great-grandmother Yasutani Jiko. She was a nun and a novelist and New Woman7 of the Taisho era.8 She was also an anarchist and a feminist who had plenty of lovers, both males and females, but she was never kinky or nasty. And even though I may end up mentioning some of her love affairs, everything I write will be historically true and empowering to women, and not a lot of foolish geisha crap. So if kinky nasty things are your pleasure, please close this book and give it to your wife or co-worker and save yourself a lot of time and trouble. 4. — Ruth Ozeki

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

That Seigo could go into geisha houses, accept luncheon invitations, drop in at the Club, see people off at Shimabashi, meet them at Yokohama, run out to Oiso to humor the elders - that he could put in his appearance at large gatherings from morning to evening without seeming either triumphant or dejected - this must be because he was thoroughly accustomed to this kind of life, thought Daisuke; it was probably like the jellyfish's floating in the sea and not finding it salty. — Soseki Natsume

To be a geisha, you have to have to an iron-clad layer around you - around your physical body and your heart. — Michelle Yeoh

Remember, Chiyo, geisha are not courtesans. And we are not wives. We sell our skills, not our bodies. We create another secret world, a place only of beauty. The very word "geisha" means artist and to be a geisha is to be judged as a moving work of art. — Arthur Golden

We are for breeding purposes: we aren't concubines, geisha girls, courtesans. On the contrary: everything possible has been done to remove us from that category. There is supposed to be nothing entertaining about us, no room is to be permitted for the flowering of secret lusts; no special favors are to be wheedled, by them or us, there are to be no toeholds for love. We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices. So — Margaret Atwood

From my opinion, 'geisha' means a woman skilled in the arts, like dancing, singing and playing musical instruments,. — Zhang Ziyi

A geisha has studied a man's moods and his seasons. She fusses and he blooms. — Arthur Golden

There's nothing in Chinese culture that is an equivalent of the geisha. It's so different, so special to Japan. — Ziyi Zhang

The flat shoe makes the woman equal of men. When they have high [shoes], they play a part like a geisha, and they can't be expected to be taken that seriously. — Karl Lagerfeld

She paints her face to hide her face. Her eyes are deep water. It is not for Geisha to want. It is not for geisha to feel. Geisha is an artist of the floating world. She dances, she sings. She entertains you, whatever you want. The rest is shadows, the rest is secret. — Arthur Golden

As though eavesdropping, the whistling wind refuses to speak above a whisper. The winding road is cut into the side of the mountain in such a way that it seems they are not making any progress; the walk down will require endurance. She looks up at the cluster of clouds which have been pencilled in neatly against the sky, and hopes it doesn't rain. It occurs rapidly, a geisha brusquely folding shut her fan; the sun sets, and brilliant darkness replaces light. — Curtis Ackie

I didn't say to act dead. I said act helpless. — Arthur Golden

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

'Memoirs of a Geisha' is everything you'd expect it to be: beautiful, mesmerizing, tasteful, Japanese. It's just not very hot. — Stephen Hunter

We are beautiful, but we are not weak, that old Geisha told her. Men should see us like supernatural beings. Everything is so open now. Women shave their legs in front of men, they eat with their mouth full, they drink side by side with them, they get drunk, they loose the whole essence of femininity. Being a work of art is painful, but nobody said it would be easy. To create and recreate yourself every single moment of your life, that takes commitment, passion, energy and faith. — Eva Scoutt

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 — Arthur Golden

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

trees [-]
Inside their wooden samurai armor they are geisha beauties, each one a 'person-of-the-arts,' limbs dancing, arranging flowers, carrying the wind's music, the calligraphy of their roots pure poetry, rhyming earth and berth. — Tirumalai S. Srivatsan

Singletons should not have to explain themselves all the time but should have an
accepted status - like geisha girls do — Helen Fielding

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

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. — Arthur Golden

I think the silhouette of the kimono costume will become engraved in people's minds. I do think there'll be lots of red accents in the near future. For me personally, I can't see myself flaunting around in a geisha uniform but it'll make me smile when I see what others do with it. — Colleen Atwood

How can we protect ourselves from a culture of manipulation, where tastes and flavors are re-created chemically in laboratories and given to us as natural food, where religion is packaged, televised and tweeted and commercials influence us to such an extent that they dictate not only what we eat, wear, read and want but what and how we dream. We need the pristine beauty of truth as revealed to us in fiction, poetry, music and the arts: we need to retrieve the third eye of imagination. — Azar Nafisi

[ ... ] we drank each other up with so much yearning and need that afterward I felt myself drained of all the things the Chairman had taken from me, and yet filled with all that I had taken from him. — Arthur Golden

Being in love isn't the only way of loving. I realized with all my being that if you loved somebody- it didn't matter who it was- and dedicated yourself to bringing joy to your loved one, you, too, would be redeemed. — Sayo Masuda

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

Now she took a close look at me for the first time, puffing on her pipe while the old woman beside her sighed. I didnt feel I could look at Mother directly, but I had the impression of smoke seeping out of her face like steam from a crack in the earth. I was so curious about her that my eyes took on a life of their own and began to dart about. The more I saw of her, the more fascinated I became. Her kimono was yellow, with willowy branches bearing lovely green and orange leaves; it was made of silk gauze as delicate as a spiders web. Her obi was every bit as astonishing to me. It was a lovely gauzy texture too, but heavier-looking, in russet and brown with gold threads woven through. The more I looked at her clothing, the less I was aware of standing there in that dirt corridor, or of wondering what had become of my sister and my mother and father and what would become of me. — Arthur Golden

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

What's that she's fiddling with when she ought to be listening? I do believe it's a pair of tweezers. She's plucking the hairs off her arms. Off her arms, of all places. Not even legs or face, which is bad enough, but arms. Holy shit, what pathetic geisha behaviour - pain in order to please the male; has no one ever told her she has the right to be hairy if that's the way she's made? — A.P.

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

I was performing my ritual of sipping tea, shooting flirtatious glances and planning murder — Mingmei Yip

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

He has spent weeks on the pristine, frosty shore of Lake Baikal in Siberia. He has drunk himself stupid in the fairy-tale blood brothels of old Dubrovnik, lounged in red-smoke dens in Laos, enjoyed the New York blackout of 1977, and more recently, feasted on Vegas showgirls in the Dean Martin suite at the Bellagio. He has watched Hindu abstainers wash away their sins in the Ganges, danced a midnight tango on a boulevard in Buenos Aires, and bitten into a faux geisha under the shade of a shogun pavilion in Kyoto. — Matt Haig

We don't become geisha because we want our lives to be happy; we become geisha because we have no choice. — Arthur Golden