{"author":"Arthur Golden","author_id":"Arthur+Golden","total_quotes":55,"quotes":[{"text":"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.","author":"Arthur Golden","tags":["future","geisha","memoirs"],"id":3689,"author_id":"Arthur+Golden"},{"text":"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.","author":"Arthur Golden","tags":["culture","fiction","geisha","japan","memoirs"],"id":16909,"author_id":"Arthur+Golden"},{"text":"A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.","author":"Arthur Golden","tags":["history","memoir","memory"],"id":25413,"author_id":"Arthur+Golden"},{"text":"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?","author":"Arthur Golden","tags":["choice","clay","destiny","geisha","hopes","impression","memoirs","memoirs-of-a-geisha"],"id":26468,"author_id":"Arthur+Golden"},{"text":"If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.","author":"Arthur Golden","tags":["geisha","love","memoirs","woman"],"id":28661,"author_id":"Arthur+Golden"},{"text":"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.","author":"Arthur Golden","tags":["hope","life","love"],"id":59453,"author_id":"Arthur+Golden"},{"text":"I never seek to defeat the man I am fighting, ' he explained. 'I seek to defeat his confidence. A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course to victory. Two men are equals - true equals - only when they both have equal confidence.","author":"Arthur Golden","tags":["confidence","doubt"],"id":65430,"author_id":"Arthur+Golden"},{"text":"And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.","author":"Arthur Golden","tags":["children","dance","geisha"],"id":72479,"author_id":"Arthur+Golden"},{"text":"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.","author":"Arthur Golden","tags":["destiny","kindness","life","love"],"id":76041,"author_id":"Arthur+Golden"},{"text":"It’s less a matter of looking the other way than of closing our eyes to what we can’t stop from happening.","author":"Arthur Golden","tags":["life","wisdom"],"id":79178,"author_id":"Arthur+Golden"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":55,"pages":6,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}