Arthur Golden Quotes (80 Quotes)

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.

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.

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

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?

All my hard work in overhearing it was it was about as rewarding to me as a man who lugs a chest up the hill only to learn that its full of rocks.

I could no more have stopped myself from feeling that sadness than you could stop yourself from smelling an apple that has been cut open on the table before you.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

We can never flee the misery that is within us.

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

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.

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

Well, I'm working on something that has absolutely nothing to do with Japan. I finally got the book written on Japan that I wanted to write.

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.

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.

When men go out, the women stay at home. And historically what has always happened is the Japanese men hire women to sit and kind of entertain them.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.