Arthur Golden Quotes

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

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.

I've often observed that men and women who were young children during these years [of defeat in war] have a certain seriousness about them; there was too little laughter in their childhoods.

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

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.

Every time I caught a glimpse of myself in the glass of a shop, I felt I was someone to be taken seriously; not a girl anymore, but a young woman.

A wounded tiger is a dangerous beast.

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

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.

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

Geisha is always called beautiful even if she is not.

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

A woman who acts like a fool is a fool.

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

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.

I knew he noticed the tress, and the mud, and the children in the street, but I had no reason to believe he'd ever notice me.

It's your duty to use what influence you have, unless you want to drift through life like a fish belly-up on the stream"
"I wish I could believe that life really is something more than a stream that carries us along, belly-up"
"Alright, if it's a stream, you're still free to be in this part of it or that part, aren't you? The water will divide again and again. If you bump, and tussle, and fight, and make use of whatever advantages you might have-"
"Oh, that's fine, I'm sure, when you have advantages."
"You'd find them everywhere, if you ever bothered to look!

It struck me that we-that moth and I-were two opposite extremes. My existence was as unstable as a stream, changing in every
way; but the moth was like a piece of stone, changing not at all. While thinking this thought, I reached out a finger to feel the moth's velvety surface; but when I brushed it with my fingertip, it turned all at once into a pile of ash without even a sound, without even a moment in which I could see it crumbling. I was so astonished I let out a cry. The swirling in my mind stopped; I felt as if I had stepped into the eye of a storm. I let the tiny shroud and its pile of ashes flutter to the ground; and now I understood the thing that had puzzled me all morning. The stale air had washed away. The past was gone.

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

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

When I unwrapped the moth from its funeral shroud, it was the same startlingly lovely creature as on the day I had entombed it. Everything about it seemed beautiful and perfect, and so utterly unchanged.

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

If we rub a fabric too often, it will quickly grow threadbare; and Nobu's words had rasped against me so much, I could no longer maintain that finely lacquered surface Mameha had always counseled me to hide behind.

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

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

The world was simply too cruel; how could I survive?

When you want to break a board, cracking it in the middle is only the first step. Success comes when you bounce up and down with all your might until the board snaps in half

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

People in the village often said she ought to have been extremely attractive, because her parents had been. Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can't put the two together; this was the terrible trick nature had played on her.

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

Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us-so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe.

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

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.

We can never flee the misery that is within us.

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

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.

I felt I was standing on a stage many hours after the dance had ended, when the silence lay as heavily upon the empty theater as a blanket of snow.

Since the day I'd left Yoroido, I'd done nothing but worry that every turn of life's wheel would bring yet another obstacle into my path; and of course, it was the worrying and the struggle that had always made life so vividly real to me.

Nothing like work for getting over a disappointment.

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?

But, Mameha-san, I don't want kindness!"
"Don't you? I thought we all wanted kindness. Perhaps what you mean is that you want something more than kindness. And that is something you're in no position to ask.

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.

You cannot say to the sun, 'More sun,' or to the rain, 'Less rain.' To a man, geisha can only be half a wife. We are the wives of nightfall. And yet, to learn kindness after so much unkindness, to understand that a little girl with more courage than she knew, would find her prayers were answered, can that not be called happiness? After all these are not the memoirs of an empress, nor of a queen. These are memoirs of another kind.

Now, Chiyo, stumbling along in life is a poor way to proceed. You must learn how to find the time and place for things.

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 knew even then that she was right. 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. Nobu's touch had made a deeper impression on me than most. No one could tell me whether he would be my ultimate destiny, but I had always sensed the en between us. Somewhere in the landscape of my life Nobu would always be present. But could it really be that of all the lessons I'd learned, the hardest one lay just ahead of me? Would I really have to take each of my hopes and put them away where no one would ever see them again, where not even I would ever see them?

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.

It was an evening of torment, and I remember only one other thing about it. At some point after everyone was asleep, I wandered away from the inn in a daze and ended up on the sea cliffs, staring out into the darkness with sound of the roaring water below me. The thundering of the ocean was like a bitter lament. I seemed to see beneath everything a layering of cruelty I have never known was there. The howling of the wind and shaking of the trees seemed to mock me. Could it really be that the stream of my life had divided forever.

My existence was as unstable as a stream, changing in every way; but the moth was like a piece of stone, changing not at all.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

When I was in the street throwing a beanbag with the other children and Mr. Tanaka happened to stroll out of the seafood company, I always stopped what I was doing to watch him.
I lay there on that slimy table while Mr. Tanaka examined my lip, pulling it down with his fingers and tipping my head this way and that. All at once he caught sight of my gray eyes, which were fixed on his face with such fascination, I couldn't pretend I hadn't been staring at him. He didn't give me a sneer, as if to say that I was an impudent girl, and he didn't look away as if it made no difference where I looked or what I thought. We stared at each other for a long moment-so long it gave me a chill even there in the muggy air of the seafood company.
"I know you," he said at last. "You're old Sakamoto's little girl."
Even as a child I could tell that Mr. Tanaka saw the world around him as it really was; he never wore the dazed look of my father. To me, he seemed to see the sap bleeding from the trunks of the pine trees, and the circle of brightness in the sky where the sun was smothered by clouds. He lived in the world that was visible, even if it didn't always please him to be there. I knew he noticed the trees, and the mud, and the children in the street, but I had no reason to believe he'd ever noticed me.
Perhaps this is why when he spoke to me, tears came stinging to my eyes.

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 the 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?

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

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

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.

I understood that he left me at the end of his long life just as naturally as the leaves fall from the trees.

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.

We human beings are only a part of something very much larger. When we walk along, we may crush a beetle or simply cause a change in the air so that a fly ends up where it might never have gone otherwise. And if we think of the same example but with ourselves in the role of the insect, and the larger universe in the role we've just played, it's perfectly clear that we're affected every day by forces over which we have no more control than the poor beetle has over our gigantic foot as it descends upon it. What are we to do? 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.

I tried to continue, but somehow my throat made up its mind to swallow – though I can't think what I was swallowing, unless it was a little knot of emotion I pushed back down because there was no room in my face for any more.

The very idea!" he said, with another big laugh. "You, growing up in a dump like Yoroido. That's like making tea in a bucket!

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

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

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.

Because I'd lived through adversity once before, what I learned about myself was like a reminder of something I'd once known but had nearly forgotten-namely, that beneath the elegant clothing, and the accomplished dancing, and the clever conversation, my life had no complexity at all, but was as simple as a stone falling toward the ground. My whole purpose in everything during the past ten years had been to win the affections of the Chairman.

Most nights I lay on my futon I was sick with anxiety, and felt a pit inside myself as big and empty as if the world were nothing more than giant hall empty of people.

A woman living in a grand house may pride herself on all her lovely things; but the moment she hears the crackle of fire she decides very quickly which are the few she values the most.

I don't know for sure what ever became of Hatsumomo. A few years after the war, I heard she was making a living as a prostitute in the Miyagawa-cho district. She couldn't have been there long, because on the night I heard it, a man at the same party swore that if Hatsumomo was a prostitute, he would find her and give her some business of his own. He did go looking for her, but she was nowhere to be found. Over the years, she probably succeeded in drinking herself to death. She certainly wouldn't have been the first geisha to do it.

In just the way that a man can grow accustomed to a bad leg, we'd all grown accustomed to having Hatsumomo in our okiya. I don't think we quite understood all the ways her presence had afflicted us until long after she'd left, when things that we hadn't realized were ailing slowly began to heal. Even when Hatsumomo had been doing nothing more than sleeping in her room, the maids had known she was there, and that during the course of the day she would abuse them. They'd lived with the kind of tension you feel if you walk across a frozen pond whose ice might break at any moment. And as for Pumpkin, I think she'd grown to be dependent on her older sister and felt strangely lost without her.

I'd already become the okiya's principal asset, but even I took some time to weed out all the peculiar habits that had taken root because of Hatsumomo. Every time a man looked at me strangely, I found myself wondering if he'd heard something u

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

Passion can quickly slip over into jealousy, or even hatred.

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

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?

He lived in a world that was visible, even if it didn't always please him to be there.

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.

[ ... ] we drank each other up with so much yearning and need that afterward I felt myself drained of all the things the Chairman had taken from me, and yet filled with all that I had taken from him.

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 have never read anything quite like Mark Haddon's funny and agonizingly honest book, or encountered a narrator more vivid and memorable. I advise you to buy two copies; you won't want to lend yours out.

We all know that a winter scene, though it may be covered over one day, with even the trees dressed in shawls of snow, will be unrecognizable the following spring. Yet I never imagined such a thing could occur within our very selves.

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

Hatsumomo's lovely smille grew ... until her lips were as rich and full as drops of blood beading at the edge of a wound

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

Water never waits. It changes shape and floes around things, and finds the secret paths no one else 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 can sweep it away. Even wood, which is its natural complement, can'survive without being nurtured by water.

Oh I'm sure you're right," Auntie said. "Probably she's just as you say. But she looks to me like a very clever girl, and adaptable; you can see that from the shape of her ears.

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.

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.

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.

[The eyes] are the most expressive part of a woman's body.