Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)

Shizuko Hoshi: Sayuri Narration

Quotes 

• Sayuri Narration : The heart dies a slow death. Shedding each hope like leaves, until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.

• Sayuri Narration : 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.

• Sayuri Narration : You cannot say to the sun, "More sun." Or to the rain, "Less rain." To a man, geisha can only be half a wife. We are the wives of nightfall. And yet, to learn kindness after so much unkindness, to understand that a little girl with more courage than she knew, would find her prayers were answered, can that not be called happiness? After all these are not the memoirs of an empress, nor of a queen. These are memoirs of another kind.

• Sayuri Narration : A story like mine should never be told. For my world is as forbidden as it is fragile. Without its mysteries it cannot survive. I certainly wasn't born to the life of a geisha. Like so much in my strange life, I was carried there by the current.

• Sayuri Narration : [while little Chiyo is on the train to the hanamachi]  My mother always said my sister, Satsu was like wood. As rooted to the earth as a sakura tree... But she told me I was like water... Water can carve its way through stone. And when trapped, water makes a new path.

• Sayuri Narration : [gazing at a ruined Hatsumomo in the streets]  I could be her. Were we so different? She loved once. She hoped once. I could be her. I might be looking into my own future... Until the real future came falling from the air.

• Sayuri Narration : [as Chiyo watches the Chairman leave with geisha]  In that moment, I changed from a girl facing nothing but emptiness, to someone with purpose. I saw that to be a geisha could be a stepping stone to something else... a place in his world.

• Sayuri Narration : If your honorable sister tells you to cut your leg, you cut your leg.