Arthur Golden Quotes

You seemed so desperate, like you might drown if someone didn't save you.

Waiting patiently doesn't suit you. 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. [Mameha]

I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.

Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.

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.

Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.

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.

I tried to continue, but somehow my throat made up its mind to swallow – though I can’t think what I was swallowing, unless it was a little knot of emotion I pushed back down because there was no room in my face for any more.

My tears simply broke through the fragile wallthat had held them, and with a terrible feeling of shame, I laid my head upon the table and let them drain out of me.

Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.

If you have experienced an evening more exciting than any in your life, you're sad to see it end; and yet you still feel grateful that it happened.

We human beings have a remarkable way of growing accustomed to things.

I've lived my life again just telling it to you.

Couldn't the wrong sort of living turn anyone mean? I remembered very well that one day back in Yoroido, a boy pushed me into a thorn bush near the pond. By the time I clawed my way out I was mad enough to bite through wood. If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.

It's less a matter of looking the other way than of closing our eyes to what we can't stop from happening.

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

Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.

We all know that a winter scene, though it may be covered over one day, with even the trees dressed in shawls of snow, will be unrecognizable the following spring. Yet I never imagined such a thing could occur within our very selves.

Adversity is like a strong wind. I don't mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are.

My feelings of disgust had been so loud within me, they’d nearly drowned out everything else.

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

A woman who acts like a fool is a fool.

The swan who goes on living in its parents' tree will die; this is why those who are beautiful and talented bear the burden of finding their own way in the world.

We can never flee the misery that is within us.

I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.

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

What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realized I'd never really tasted to things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been. What life would I have? I would be like the dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.

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.

of course the pace of change never slows, even when we've convinced ourselves it will.

After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.

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

When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.

At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

No one knows the author of memoir so well like himself.

The corridor couldn't have smelled more strongly of fish guts if we had actually been inside a fish.

Sadness was a very heavy thing.

Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.

I fell into a sound sleep and dreamed that I was at a banquet back in Gion, talking with an elderly man who was explaining to me that his wife, whom he'd cared for deeply, wasn't really dead because the pleasure of their time together lived on inside him.

I stumbled out into the courtyard to try to flee my misery, but of course we can never flee the misery that is within us.

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.

If those sorts of moments would be the only pleasure life offered me, I'd be better off shutting out that one brilliant source of light to let my eyes begin to adjust to the darkness.

A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.

His face was very heavily creased, and into each crease he had tucked some worry or other, so that it wasn't really his face any longer, but more like a tree that had nests of birds in all of the branches. He had to struggle constantly to manage it and always looked worn out from the effort.

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.

Was life nothing more than a storm that constantly washed away what had been there only a moment before, and left behind something barren and unrecognizable?

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 a 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?

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

Never give up; for even rivers someday wash dams away.