Arthur Golden Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

Adversity is like a strong wind…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, and not merely as we might like to be.

Arthur Golden
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
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.

Arthur Golden
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?

Arthur Golden
Occasionally in life we come upon things we can't understand, because we have never seen anything similar.

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

Arthur Golden
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
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.

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

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

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

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

Arthur Golden
I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arthur Golden
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.

Arthur Golden
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