Arthur Golden Quotes

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

of course the pace of change never slows, even when we've convinced ourselves it will.

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?

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

A woman who acts like a fool is a fool.

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

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

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

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.

A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.

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

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

Time your actions so you're not fighting against the currents but moving with them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

My feelings of disgust had been so loud within me, they’d nearly drowned out everything else.

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.

And when I raised myself to look at the man who'd spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall.

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.

Finally the homeless eel marked its territory, I suppose, and the Doctor lay heavily upon me, moist with sweat.

A wounded tiger is a dangerous beast.

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

Geisha is always called beautiful even if she is not.

Nothing is as bleak as the future, except the past.

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

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.

A mouse who wishes to fool the cat doesn't simply scamper out of its hole whenever it feels the slightest urge.

The prettiest of them all is a girl who is pretty on the inside.

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

No one knows the author of memoir so well like himself.

And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.

I would've had an easier time if my emotions had all pulled me in the same direction, but it wasn't so simple. I'd been blown about like a scrap of paper in the wind.

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

When I said these words, all the heat in my body seemed to rise to my face. I felt I might float up into the air, just like a piece of ash from a fire.

Sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier.

If he couldn't forgive you for what you'd done, it was clear to me he was never truly your destiny.

Even now that he is gone I have him still, in the richness of my memories. I've lived my life again just telling it to you.

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

And when I raised myself to look at the man who’d spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall.

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