Arthur Golden citations

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“I dont think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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 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.”

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