Arthur Golden citations

Page 2

“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.”

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

“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?”

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

“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.”

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

“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 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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”