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.

She paints her face to hide her face. Her eyes are deep water. It is not for Geisha to want. It is not for geisha to feel. Geisha is an artist of the floating world. She dances, she sings. She entertains you, whatever you want. The rest is shadows, the rest is secret.

Adversity is like a strong wind. I don't mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are.

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.

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.

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.

I studied Japanese language and culture in college and graduate school, and afterward went to work in Tokyo, where I met a young man whose father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha. He and I never discussed his parentage, which was an open secret, but it fascinated me.

Geisha because when I was living in Japan, I met a fellow whose mother was a geisha, and I thought that was kind of fascinating and ended up reading about the subject just about the same time I was getting interested in writing fiction.

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.

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 - the tiny hole through the roof or the bottom of a box. There's no doubt it's the most versatile of the five elements. It can wash away earth; it can put out fire, it can wear a piece of metal down and sweep it away. Even wood, which is its natural complement, can't survive without being nurtured by water And yet, you haven't drawn on those strengths in living your life, have you?

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.

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

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

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

Here's the thing: this eel spends its entire life trying to find a home, and what do you think women have inside them? Caves, where the eels like to live...when they find a cave they like, the wriggle around inside it for a while to be sure that...well, to be sure it's a nice cave, I suppose. And when they've made up their minds that it's comfortable, they mark the cave as their territory...by spitting.

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

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.

Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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]

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

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.

Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.

But what I could see out of the corner of my eye made me think of two lovely bundles of silk floating along a stream. In a moment they were hovering on the walkway in front of me, where they sank down and smoothed their kimono across their knees.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Passion can quickly slip to jealousy, or even hatred.

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

From this experience, I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn't there. What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I'd spent every day watching for a man who would never come to me? What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realize I'd never really tasted the things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been, because I'd thought of nothing but the Chairman even while my life was drifting away from me. 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.