Arthur Golden Quotes

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

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.

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.

I worried she might spend an afternoon chatting with me about the sights and then wish me best of luck.

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

I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.

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.

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

Passion can quickly slip to jealousy, or even hatred.

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.

The corridor couldn't have smelled more strongly of fish guts if we had actually been inside a fish.

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

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.

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

Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.

Of course, a sign doesn't mean anything unless you know how to interpret it.

My tears simply broke through the fragile wallthat had held them, and with a terrible feeling of shame, I laid my head upon the table and let them drain out of me.

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

Here again, I saw life in all its noisy excitement passing me by.

Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.

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

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

We can never flee the misery that is within us.

We must use whatever methods we can to understand the movement of the universe around us and time our actions so that we are not fighting the currents, but moving with them.

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.

Sadness was a very heavy thing.

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?

It's less a matter of looking the other way than of closing our eyes to what we can't stop from happening.

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.

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

I don't like things held up before me that I cannot have.

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?

My mother once told me I was like water. Water can carve its way even through stone. And when trapped, water makes a new path.