Top 100 Arthur Golden Quotes
#1. I understood that he left me at the end of his long life just as naturally as the leaves fall from the trees.
Arthur Golden
#2. 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.
Arthur Golden
#3. 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.
Arthur Golden
#4. We don't become geisha because we want our lives to be happy; we become geisha because we have no choice.
Arthur Golden
#5. 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.
Arthur Golden
#6. He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.
Arthur Golden
#7. 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.
Arthur Golden
#8. This time all the historical details and things were right. But I'd written it again in third person, and people found it dry. I decided to throw that one away.
Arthur Golden
#9. Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.
Arthur Golden
#10. I've lived my life again just telling it to you.
Arthur Golden
#11. 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.
Arthur Golden
#12. Since the day I'd left Yoroido, I'd done nothing but worry that every turn of life's wheel would bring yet another obstacle into my path; and of course, it was the worrying and the struggle that had always made life so vividly real to me.
Arthur Golden
#13. When you want to break a board, cracking it in the middle is only the first step. Success comes when you bounce up and down with all your might until the board snaps in half
Arthur Golden
#14. Hatsumomo's lovely smille grew ... until her lips were as rich and full as drops of blood beading at the edge of a wound
Arthur Golden
#15. 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.
Arthur Golden
#16. He lived in a world that was visible, even if it didn't always please him to be there.
Arthur Golden
#17. Some people have difficulty telling the difference between something great and something they've simply heard of.
Arthur Golden
#18. 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]
Arthur Golden
#19. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper. a
Arthur Golden
#20. Happily I didn't see her after she'd died, except for her legs, which were visible from the doorway and looked like slender tree limbs wrapped in wrinkled silk. - Chapter 10, pg 124
Arthur Golden
#21. A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course of victory.
Arthur Golden
#22. How many times already had I encountered the painful lesson that although we may wish for the barb to be pulled from our flesh, it leaves a welt that doesn't heal?
Arthur Golden
#23. I worried she might spend an afternoon chatting with me about the sights and then wish me best of luck.
Arthur Golden
#24. 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.
Arthur Golden
#25. Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.
Arthur Golden
#26. I learned that year that nothing is so unpredictable as who will survive a war and who won't.
Arthur Golden
#27. Time your actions so you're not fighting against the currents but moving with them.
Arthur Golden
#28. The corridor couldn't have smelled more strongly of fish guts if we had actually been inside a fish.
Arthur Golden
#29. 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.
Arthur Golden
#30. Whatever our struggles,and whether we sink or swim,our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean
Arthur Golden
#31. 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?
Arthur Golden
#32. 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
Arthur Golden
#33. I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulling me down toward them.
Arthur Golden
#34. 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.
Arthur Golden
#35. Passion can quickly slip to jealousy, or even hatred.
Arthur Golden
#36. Most nights I lay on my futon I was sick with anxiety, and felt a pit inside myself as big and empty as if the world were nothing more than giant hall empty of people.
Arthur Golden
#37. Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.
Arthur Golden
#38. Here again, I saw life in all its noisy excitement passing me by.
Arthur Golden
#39. We none of us find as much kindness in this world as we should.
Arthur Golden
#40. 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.
Arthur Golden
#41. You seemed so desperate, like you might drown if someone didn't save you.
Arthur Golden
#42. Dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes consume us completely.
Arthur Golden
#43. But she told me I was like water..Water can carve its way through stone. And when trapped, water makes a new path.
Arthur Golden
#44. 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.
Arthur Golden
#45. I've often observed that men and women who were young children during these years [of defeat in war] have a certain seriousness about them; there was too little laughter in their childhoods.
Arthur Golden
#47. 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.
Arthur Golden
#48. Occasionally in life we come upon things we can't understand, because we have never seen anything similar.
Arthur Golden
#49. 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.
Arthur Golden
#50. 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.
Arthur Golden
#51. 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
Arthur Golden
#52. Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.
Arthur Golden
#53. What I really wanted to know, though, was what it was like to be a geisha? Where do you sleep? What do you eat? How do you have your hair done?
Arthur Golden
#54. What I had to do was keep the story within certain limits of what was, of course, plausible.
Arthur Golden
#55. Nothing like work for getting over a disappointment.
Arthur Golden
#56. By the time we arrived, as evening was approaching, I felt as sore as a rock must feel when the waterfall has pounded on it all day long.
Arthur Golden
#57. I didn't say to act dead. I said act helpless.
Arthur Golden
#58. This character's entirely invented, and the woman that I interviewed wouldn't recognize herself, or really anything about herself, in this book, which she hasn't read, because she doesn't read English.
Arthur Golden
#59. 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, and not merely as we might like to be.
Arthur Golden
#60. My existence was as unstable as a stream, changing in every way; but the moth was like a piece of stone, changing not at all.
Arthur Golden
#61. Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.
Arthur Golden
#62. After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.
Arthur Golden
#63. I have never read anything quite like Mark Haddon's funny and agonizingly honest book, or encountered a narrator more vivid and memorable. I advise you to buy two copies; you won't want to lend yours out.
Arthur Golden
#64. It is confusing, because in this culture we really don't have anything that corresponds to geisha.
Arthur Golden
#65. Finally the homeless eel marked its territory, I suppose, and the Doctor lay heavily upon me, moist with sweat.
Arthur Golden
#66. Never give up; for even rivers someday wash dams away.
Arthur Golden
#67. Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are.
Arthur Golden
#68. 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.
Arthur Golden
#69. A geisha has studied a man's moods and his seasons. She fusses and he blooms.
Arthur Golden
#70. Of course the pace of change never slows, even when we've convinced ourselves it will.
Arthur Golden
#72. A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.
Arthur Golden
#73. It's less a matter of looking the other way than of closing our eyes to what we can't stop from happening.
Arthur Golden
#74. 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.
Arthur Golden
#75. Geisha is always called beautiful even if she is not.
Arthur Golden
#76. If we rub a fabric too often, it will quickly grow threadbare; and Nobu's words had rasped against me so much, I could no longer maintain that finely lacquered surface Mameha had always counseled me to hide behind.
Arthur Golden
#77. If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.
Arthur Golden
#78. It was what we Japanese called the onion life, peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while.
Arthur Golden
#79. This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes they consume us completely.
Arthur Golden
#80. 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.
Arthur Golden
#81. I can tolerate his company for about half an hour. After that I am not responsible for the things I say!
Arthur Golden
#82. If you keep your destiny in mind, every moment in life becomes an opportunity for moving closer to it.
Arthur Golden
#83. 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
Arthur Golden
#84. Nothing is as bleak as the future, except the past.
Arthur Golden
#85. 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.
Arthur Golden
#86. 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.
Arthur Golden
#87. I would've had an easier time if my emotions had all pulled me in the same direction, but it wasn't so simple. I'd been blown about like a scrap of paper in the wind.
Arthur Golden
#88. 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.
Arthur Golden
#89. 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
Arthur Golden
#90. Is this how you act toward your honored guest? You must take him out onto the street and walk him around a bit to wake him up. The cold will do him good."
"He's lying in the snow. Isn't that cold enough?
Arthur Golden
#91. Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.
Arthur Golden
#92. Memoirs give the knowledge about the author and his environment. They are different from biography. Memoirs do not get ahead, and the man who writes a biography looks at his future like at a very simple thing.
Arthur Golden
#93. 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.
Arthur Golden
#94. Nothing is bleaker than the future, except perhaps the past.
Arthur Golden
#95. When a man takes a mistress, he doesn't turn around and divorce his wife.
Arthur Golden
#96. Isn't there one thing I can ask of you that you won't disregard? ... You could just reply, "Yes, Baron," and be done with it.'
Yes, Baron.
Arthur Golden
#97. 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.
Arthur Golden
#98. If he couldn't forgive you for what you'd done, it was clear to me he was never truly your destiny.
Arthur Golden
#99. 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.
Arthur Golden
#100. When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.
Arthur Golden
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