Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

"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."

"Can't you see? Every step I have taken, since I was that child on the bridge, has been to bring myself closer to you."

"The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains."

"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."

"Of course, a sign doesn't mean anything unless you know how to interpret it."

"Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one."

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

"And when I raised myself to look at the man who’d spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall."

"I don't know when we'll see each other again or what the world will be like when we do. We may both have seen many horrible things. But I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world."

"Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one."

"At the temple there is a poem called "Loss"carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it."

"Watch for the thing that will show itself to you. Because that thing, when you find it, will be your future."

"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."

"The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains."