Top 119 Quotes & Sayings by Arthur Golden

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

We can never flee the misery that is within us.

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

Passion can quickly slip to jealousy, or even hatred.

This time all the historical details and things were right. But I'd written it again in third person, and people found it dry. I decided to throw that one away.

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

What I really wanted to know, though, was what it was like to be a geisha? Where do you sleep? What do you eat? How do you have your hair done?

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

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

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.

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.

What I had to do was keep the story within certain limits of what was, of course, plausible.

Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are.

This character's entirely invented, and the woman that I interviewed wouldn't recognize herself, or really anything about herself, in this book, which she hasn't read, because she doesn't read English.

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.

It is confusing, because in this culture we really don't have anything that corresponds to geisha.

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.

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

For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I'd always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness-- a world in which fathers didn't sell their daughters.

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.

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

Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.

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.

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.

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.

A wounded tiger is a dangerous beast.

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

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]

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Couldn't the wrong sort of living turn anyone mean? I remembered very well that one day back in Yoroido, a boy pushed me into a thorn bush near the pond. By the time I clawed my way out I was mad enough to bite through wood. If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Geisha is always called beautiful even if she is not.

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.

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

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.

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.