Quotes by Arthur Golden

I dont know when well 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.

For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one Id always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness-- a world in which fathers didnt sell their daughters.

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.

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.

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

I began to feel that all the people Id ever known who had died or left me had not in fact gone away, but continued to live on inside me just as this mans wife lived on inside him.

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.

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 Ive relied on it.

When a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.

Once when I was a little child of six or so, I watched a spider spinning its web in a corner of the house. Before the spider had even finished its job, a mosquito flew right into the web and was trapped there. The spider didnt pay it any attention at first, but went on with what it was doing; only when it was finished did it creep over on its pointy toes and sting that poor mosquito to death. As I sat there on that wooden floor and watched Hatsumomo come reaching for me with her delicate fingers, I knew I was trapped in a web she had spun for me.

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

Friendship is a precious thing, Sayuri. One mustnt throw it away.

To the eyes of the American soldiers who drove past, I looked no different from the women around me; and as I thought of it, who could say I was any different? If you no longer have leaves, or bark, or roots, can you go on calling yourself a tree? I am a peasant, I said to myself, and not a geisha at all any longer. It was a frightening feeling to look at my hands and see their roughness. To draw my mind away from my fears, I turned my attention again to the truckloads of soldiers driving past. Werent these the very American soldiers wed been taught to hate, who had bombed our cities with such horrifying weapons? Now they rode through our neighborhood, throwing pieces of candy to the children.

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

Perhaps it seems odd that a casual meeting on the street could have brought about such change. But sometimes life is like that isnt it

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

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.

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

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

When a man takes a mistress, he doesnt turn around and divorce his wife.