Arthur Golden Quotes

55 Sourced Quotes

The swan who goes on living in its parents' tree will die; this is why those who are beautiful and talented bear the burden of finding their own way in the world.

Arthur Golden
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.

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

Arthur Golden
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?

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

Arthur Golden
Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can't put the two together...

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

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

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

Arthur Golden
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
I was thanking him for...well, for something I'm not sure I can explain even now. For showing me that something besides cruelty could be found in the world, I suppose.

Arthur Golden
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.

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

Arthur Golden
His face was very heavily creased, and into each crease he had tucked some worry or other, so that it wasn't really his face any longer, but more like a tree that had nests of birds in all of the branches. He had to struggle constantly to manage it and always looked worn out from the effort.

Arthur Golden
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

Arthur Golden
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
We none of us find as much kindness in this world as we should.

Arthur Golden
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
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
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
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

Arthur Golden
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
Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.

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

Arthur Golden