Arthur Golden Quotes

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.

Anyone can have a good day. The question is what do you do on a bad day. That's when you're being tested. In a very tangible sense, a bad day shows your innermost essence more than a good day.

Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can't put the two together.

As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.

You know, the men go to tea houses with the expectation that they will have a nice quiet evening and not read about it the next morning in the newspaper.

It's your duty to use what influence you have, unless you want to drift through life like a fish belly-up on the stream" "I wish I could believe that life really is something more than a stream that carries us along, belly-up" "Alright, if it's a stream, you're still free to be in this part of it or that part, aren't you? The water will divide again and again. If you bump, and tussle, and fight, and make use of whatever advantages you might have-" "Oh, that's fine, I'm sure, when you have advantages." "You'd find them everywhere, if you ever bothered to look!

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

I had to wonder if men were so blinded by beauty that they would feel privileged to live their lives with an actual demon, so long as it was a beautiful demon.

Finally the homeless eel marked its territory, I suppose, and the Doctor lay heavily upon me, moist with sweat.

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.

Neither you nor I can know your destiny. You may never know it! Destiny isn't always like a party at the end of the evening. Sometimes it's nothing more than struggling through life from day to day.

We must use whatever methods we can to understand the movement of the universe around us and time our actions so that we are not fighting the currents, but moving with them.

From this experience, I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn't there. What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I'd spent every day watching for a man who would never come to me? What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realize I'd never really tasted the things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been, because I'd thought of nothing but the Chairman even while my life was drifting away from me. 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.

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

I could no more have stopped myself from feeling that sadness than you could stop yourself from smelling an apple that has been cut open on the table before you.

When a man takes a mistress, he doesn't turn around and divorce his wife.

Passion can quickly slip to jealousy, or even hatred.

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

Friendship is a precious thing, Sayuri. One mustn't throw it away.

A mouse who wishes to fool the cat doesn't simply scamper out of its hole whenever it feels the slightest urge.

And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped around my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

Here's the thing: this eel spends its entire life trying to find a home, and what do you think women have inside them? Caves, where the eels like to live...when they find a cave they like, the wriggle around inside it for a while to be sure that...well, to be sure it's a nice cave, I suppose. And when they've made up their minds that it's comfortable, they mark the cave as their territory...by spitting.

Geisha is always called beautiful even if she is not.

Now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.

Seeing him again after so long awakened something inside me. I was surprised to find myself feeling sad rather than joyful, as I would have imagined.

He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.

She paints her face to hide her face. Her eyes are deep water. It is not for Geisha to want. It is not for geisha to feel. Geisha is an artist of the floating world. She dances, she sings. She entertains you, whatever you want. The rest is shadows, the rest is secret.

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.

Some people have difficulty telling the difference between something great and something they've simply heard of.

If you keep your destiny in mind, every moment in life becomes an opportunity for moving closer to it.

The prettiest of them all is a girl who is pretty on the inside.

It was what we Japanese called the onion life, peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while.

Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.

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.

A wounded tiger is a dangerous beast.

I worried she might spend an afternoon chatting with me about the sights and then wish me best of luck.

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.

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.

All at once I felt so vain, like a girl posturing for the crowds as she walks along, only to discover the street is empty.

A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course of victory.

My mother once told me I was like water. Water can carve its way even through stone. And when trapped, water makes a new path.

Here again, I saw life in all its noisy excitement passing me by.

I studied Japanese language and culture in college and graduate school, and afterward went to work in Tokyo, where I met a young man whose father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha. He and I never discussed his parentage, which was an open secret, but it fascinated me.

If Mother and Mameha couldn't come to an agreement, I would remain a maid all my life just as surely as a turtle remains a turtle

This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes they consume us completely.

Those of us with water in our personalities don't pick where we'll flow to. All we can do is flow where the landscape of our lives carries us

Nothing is as bleak as the future, except the past.

Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us-so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe.