Top 100 Arthur Golden Quotes
#1. You seemed so desperate, like you might drown if someone didn't save you.
Arthur Golden
#2. 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
#3. Every man has his destiny. But who needs to go to a fortune-teller to find it? Do I go to a chef to find out if I'm hungry?
Arthur Golden
#4. When I unwrapped the moth from its funeral shroud, it was the same startlingly lovely creature as on the day I had entombed it. Everything about it seemed beautiful and perfect, and so utterly unchanged.
Arthur Golden
#5. Occasionally in life we come upon things we can't understand, because we have never seen anything similar.
Arthur Golden
#6. 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
#8. I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; Garlands from window to window; Golden chains from star to star ... And I dance.
Arthur Rimbaud
#9. My tears simply broke through the fragile wall
that had held them, and with a terrible feeling of shame, I laid my head upon the table and let them drain out of me.
Arthur Golden
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. Dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes consume us completely.
Arthur Golden
#14. A woman living in a grand house may pride herself on all her lovely things; but the moment she hears the crackle of fire she decides very quickly which are the few she values the most.
Arthur Golden
#15. A mouse who wishes to fool the cat doesn't simply scamper out of its hole whenever it feels the slightest urge.
Arthur Golden
#16. 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
#17. We none of us find as much kindness in this world as we should.
Arthur Golden
#18. Here again, I saw life in all its noisy excitement passing me by.
Arthur Golden
#19. Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.
Arthur Golden
#20. 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
#21. Passion can quickly slip to jealousy, or even hatred.
Arthur Golden
#22. No one knows the author of memoir so well like himself.
Arthur Golden
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Of course, a sign doesn't mean anything unless you know how to interpret it.
Arthur Golden
#26. I don't like things held up before me that I cannot have.
Arthur Golden
#27. 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
#28. Passion can quickly slip over into jealousy, or even hatred.
Arthur Golden
#29. Water is powerful. It can wash away earth, put out fire, and even destroy iron.
Arthur Golden
#30. 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.
Arthur Golden
#31. Clouds of insects danced and buzzed in the golden autumn light, and the air was full of the piping of the song-birds. Long, glinting dragonflies shot across the path, or hung tremulous with gauzy wings and gleaming bodies.
Arthur Conan Doyle
#32. 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.
Arthur Golden
#33. 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
#34. Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.
Arthur Golden
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. I didn't say to act dead. I said act helpless.
Arthur Golden
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. Remember, Chiyo, geisha are not courtesans. And we are not wives. We sell our skills, not our bodies. We create another secret world, a place only of beauty. The very word "geisha" means artist and to be a geisha is to be judged as a moving work of art.
Arthur Golden
#42. Nothing like work for getting over a disappointment.
Arthur Golden
#43. What I had to do was keep the story within certain limits of what was, of course, plausible.
Arthur Golden
#44. 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
#45. Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.
Arthur Golden
#46. 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
#47. Geisha because when I was living in Japan, I met a fellow whose mother was a geisha, and I thought that was kind of fascinating and ended up reading about the subject just about the same time I was getting interested in writing fiction.
Arthur Golden
#48. People in the village often said she ought to have been extremely attractive, because her parents had been. Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can't put the two together; this was the terrible trick nature had played on her.
Arthur Golden
#49. Now, Chiyo, stumbling along in life is a poor way to proceed. You must learn how to find the time and place for things.
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. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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.
Arthur Golden
#54. 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
#55. I worked on this Showtime series called 'Beggars and Choosers,' this was like 2000, and Bea Arthur guest-starred on our show. I always loved 'The Golden Girls,' and thought she was a supreme comedy actress, supreme actress period.
Sherri Saum
#56. 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.
Arthur Golden
#57. Watch for the thing that will show itself to you. Because that thing, when you find it, will be your future.
Arthur Golden
#58. 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
#59. Here you are ... A beautiful girl with nothing to be ashamed of ... And yet you are afraid to look at me. Someone has been cruel to you ... Or perhaps life has been cruel.
"I don't know sir" I said, Though of course I knew perfectly well.
Arthur Golden
#60. 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
#61. I've lived my life again just telling it to you.
Arthur Golden
#62. Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.
Arthur Golden
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even a stone can be worn down with enough rain.
Arthur Golden
#66. He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.
Arthur Golden
#67. 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
#68. 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.
Arthur Golden
#69. My favorite place that I've been to that most people haven't been to is the Golden Triangle in the northeast of Thailand, which is inhabited by people as if in the Stone Age, without any form of power, without running water, simply living in huts on stilts.
Arthur Frommer
#70. We human beings have a remarkable way of growing accustomed to things.
Arthur Golden
#71. We don't become geisha because we want our lives to be happy; we become geisha because we have no choice.
Arthur Golden
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. [ ... ] we drank each other up with so much yearning and need that afterward I felt myself drained of all the things the Chairman had taken from me, and yet filled with all that I had taken from him.
Arthur Golden
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. Whatever our struggles,and whether we sink or swim,our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean
Arthur Golden
#79. 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
#80. I long ago developed a very practical smile, which I call my "Noh smile" because it resembles a Noh mask whose features are frozen. Its advantage is that men can interpret it however they want; you can imagine how often I've relied on it.
Arthur Golden
#81. The corridor couldn't have smelled more strongly of fish guts if we had actually been inside a fish.
Arthur Golden
#82. And suddenly everything around me seemed to grow quiet, as if he were the wind that blew and I were just a cloud carried upon it.
Arthur Golden
#83. Time your actions so you're not fighting against the currents but moving with them.
Arthur Golden
#84. I learned that year that nothing is so unpredictable as who will survive a war and who won't.
Arthur Golden
#85. Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.
Arthur Golden
#86. 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
#88. I worried she might spend an afternoon chatting with me about the sights and then wish me best of luck.
Arthur Golden
#89. The very idea!" he said, with another big laugh. "You, growing up in a dump like Yoroido. That's like making tea in a bucket!
Arthur Golden
#90. A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course of victory.
Arthur Golden
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. I knew he noticed the tress, and the mud, and the children in the street, but I had no reason to believe he'd ever notice me.
Arthur Golden
#94. 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.
Arthur Golden
#95. They would never know how lucky they had been. For a lifetime, mankind had achieved as much happiness as any race can ever know. It had been the Golden Age. But gold was also the color of sunset, of autumn: and only Karellen's ears could catch the first wailings of the winter storms.
Arthur C. Clarke
#96. 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
#97. The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.
Arthur Golden
#98. Some people have difficulty telling the difference between something great and something they've simply heard of.
Arthur Golden
#99. 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.
Arthur Golden
#100. He lived in a world that was visible, even if it didn't always please him to be there.
Arthur Golden
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