50 Books to Read Before You Die

words to inspire before you expire

Tag: Human Trafficking

November 20, 2017 /

“Ordinarily a man on the streets of Gion wouldn’t notice a girl like me . . . yet not only had this man bothered to speak to me, he’d actually spoken kindly. He’d addressed me in a way that suggested I might be a young woman of standing—the daughter of a good friend, perhaps. 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. The noise and hubbub of so many people living their lives of purpose around me seemed to stop; or at least, I ceased to be aware of it. 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.”

—from Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

November 16, 2017 /

“I couldn’t help feeling, the more I looked at her, that she was like a tree that has begun to lose its leaves. I was so shocked by the whole effect that I think I must have taken a step back, or let out a gasp, or in some way given her some hint of my feelings, for all at once she said to me, in that raspy voice of hers:

‘What are you looking at!’

‘I’m very sorry, ma’am. I was looking at your kimono,’ I told her. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it.’

This must have been the right answer—if there was a right answer—because she let out something of a laugh, though it sounded like a cough.

‘So you like it, do you?’ she said, continuing to cough, or laugh, I couldn’t tell which. ‘Do you have any idea what it cost?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘More than you did, that’s for certain.'”

—from Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

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