Arthur Golden quotes

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.
-- Arthur Golden

#Life #Saying Goodbye #Thinking

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.
-- Arthur Golden

#Strength #Success #Encouraging

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

#Giving Up #Rivers #Dams

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.
-- Arthur Golden

#Confidence #Fighting #Men

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

#Pain #Thinking #Speak

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.
-- Arthur Golden

#Inspirational #Life #One Direction

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

#Fighting #Kind #Urgency

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

#Song #Mind #Singing

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

#Moving #Destiny #Opportunity

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.
-- Arthur Golden

#Sad #Trying #Misery

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.
-- Arthur Golden

#Grief #Grieving #One Day

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.
-- Arthur Golden

#Believe #People #Choices

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.
-- Arthur Golden

#Death #Loss #Three

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.
-- Arthur Golden

#Children #Taken #Bridges

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

#Girl #Stupid #Silly

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.
-- Arthur Golden

#Daughter #Kindness #Father

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.
-- Arthur Golden

#Ocean #Struggle #Our World

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

#Onions #Layers #Cry

Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.
-- Arthur Golden

#Rain #Stones #Enough

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.
-- Arthur Golden

#Moving #Fighting #Use

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

#Mean

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

#Real #Thinking #Remember

Passion can quickly slip to jealousy, or even hatred.
-- Arthur Golden

#Jealousy #Passion #Hatred

We can never flee the misery that is within us.
-- Arthur Golden

#Misery

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.
-- Arthur Golden

#Beautiful #Men #Long

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

#Dream #Adversity #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.
-- Arthur Golden

#Good Day #Bad Day #Essence

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
-- Arthur Golden

#Life Is Like #Sometimes #Odd

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

#Fear #Water #Ponds

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

#Inspirational #Success #Fear

In the instant before the door opened, I could almost sense my life expanding just like a river whose waters have begun to swell; for I had never before taken such a drastic step to change the course of my own future. I was like a child tiptoeing along a precipice overlooking the sea. And yet somehow I hadn't imagined a great wave might come and strike me there, and wash everything away.
-- Arthur Golden

#Children #Taken #Rivers

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.
-- Arthur Golden

#Spring #Winter #Self

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

#Might #Like You #Desperate

I cannot tell you what it is that guides us in this life; but for me, I fell toward the Chairman just as a stone must fall toward the earth. When I cut my lip and met Mr. Tanaka, when my mother died and I was cruelly sold, it was all like a stream that falls over rocky cliffs before it can reach the ocean. Even now that he is gone I have him still, in the richness of my memories.
-- Arthur Golden

#Mother #Memories #Ocean

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.
-- Arthur Golden

#Men #People #Wife

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!
-- Arthur Golden

#Believe #Fighting #Water

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

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

#Feelings #Loud #Disgusting

Geisha is always called beautiful even if she is not.
-- Arthur Golden

#Beautiful #Geisha

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

#Kind #Painful #Melancholy

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.
-- Arthur Golden

#Eye #Light #Darkness

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.
-- Arthur Golden

#Thinking #Mind #Swallowing

A woman who acts like a fool is a fool.
-- Arthur Golden

#Fool

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.
-- Arthur Golden

#Eye #Artist #Water

Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.
-- Arthur Golden

#Simple #Life Is #Imagine

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

#Memoir #Wells

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.
-- Arthur Golden

#Wall #Men #Leaving

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

#Fishes #Guts

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.
-- Arthur Golden

#Writing #Past #Men

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

#Growing #Way #Remarkable

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

#Eye #Matter #Way

Memoirs give the knowledge about the author and his environment. They are different from biography. Memoirs do not get ahead, and the man who writes a biography looks at his future like at a very simple thing.
-- Arthur Golden

#Writing #Simple #Men

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.
-- Arthur Golden

#Feelings #Tears #Tables

Nothing is as bleak as the future, except the past.
-- Arthur Golden

#Past #Bleak

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

#Saws #Excitement #Passing

A wounded tiger is a dangerous beast.
-- Arthur Golden

#Beast #Dangerous #Wounded

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

#Pace #Pace Of Change

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.
-- Arthur Golden

#Mother #Water #Stones

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.
-- Arthur Golden

#Morning #Nice #Men

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

#Records #World #Memoir

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

#Moving #Fighting #Time Management

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.
-- Arthur Golden

#Mother #Reading #Writing

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

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

#Divorce #Men #Wife

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.
-- Arthur Golden

#Life #Rocks #Long

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

#Sight #Luck #Wish

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.
-- Arthur Golden

#Eye #Thinking #Two

Sadness was a very heavy thing.
-- Arthur Golden

#Sadness #Heavy

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

#Precious Things