Arthur Golden Quotes

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.”

“Occasionally in life we come upon things we can't understand, because we have never seen anything similar.”

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

“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?”

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

“We none of us find as much kindness in this world as we should.”

“I was thanking him for… well, for something I'm not sure I can explain even now. For showing me that something besides cruelty could be found in the world, I suppose.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Water is powerful. It can wash away earth, put out fire, and even destroy iron.”

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

“We can never flee the misery that is within us.”

“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]”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.”

“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?”

“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.”

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

“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”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“A wounded tiger is a dangerous beast.”

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

“Nothing like work for getting over a disappointment.”

“I didn't say to act dead. I said act helpless.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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