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Arthur Golden Quotes | Quotes said by Arthur Golden

  • Arthur Golden Quote #1

    …ora so che il nostro mondo è tanto instabile quanto un'onda che si innalza in mezzo all'oceano. Quali che siano stati i nostri conflitti e i nostri trionfi, per quanto indelebile sia il segno che questi abbiano potuto lasciare su di noi, finiscono sempre per stemperarsi come una tinta ad acquerello su un foglio di carta.


  • Arthur Golden Quote #2

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

  • Arthur Golden Quote #3

    A woman who acts like a fool is a fool.

  • Arthur Golden Quote #4

    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 Quote #5

    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.

  • Arthur Golden Quote #6

    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 Quote #7

    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.

  • Arthur Golden Quote #8

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

  • Arthur Golden Quote #9

    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 Quote #10

    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.

  • Arthur Golden Quote #11

    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 Quote #12

    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.

  • Arthur Golden Quote #13

    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.

  • Arthur Golden Quote #14

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

  • Arthur Golden Quote #15

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

  • Arthur Golden Quote #16

    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 Quote #17

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

  • Arthur Golden Quote #18

    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 Quote #19

    He stood with his two frail hands on his cane and his eyes closed, and breathed in deeply the scent of the past. Sometimes, he sighed, I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.

  • Arthur Golden Quote #20

    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.

  • Arthur Golden Quote #21

    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 Quote #22

    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 Quote #23

    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 Quote #24

    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 Quote #25

    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?

  • Arthur Golden Quote #26

    I long ago developed a very practical smile, which I call my Noh smile because it resembles a Noh mask whose features are frozen. Its advantage is that men can interpret it however they want; you can imagine how often I've relied on it.

  • Arthur Golden Quote #27

    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 Quote #28

    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.

  • Arthur Golden Quote #29

    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 Quote #30

    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.

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