Arthur Golden > Quotes

“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.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“It was what we Japanese called the onion life, peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Watch for the thing that will show itself to you. Because that thing, when you find it, will be your future.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“She paints her face to hide her face. Her eyes are deep water. It is not for Geisha to want. It is not for geisha to feel. Geisha is an artist of the floating world. She dances, she sings. She entertains you, whatever you want. The rest is shadows, the rest is secret.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“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.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“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 -- the tiny hole through the roof or the bottom of the box. There's no doubt it's the most versatile of the five elements. It can wash away earth; it can put out fire; it can wear a piece of metal down and sweep it away. Even wood, which is its natural complement, can't survive without being nurtured by water. And yet, you haven't drawn on those strengths in living your life, have you?”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Occasionally in life we come upon things we can't understand, because we have never seen anything similar.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“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, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“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, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“A tree may look as beautiful as ever; but when you notice the insects infesting it, and the tips of the branches that are brown from disease, even the trunk seems to lose some of its magnificence. ”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“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, Memoirs of a Geisha

“We don't become geisha because we want our lives to be happy; we become geisha because we have no choice.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“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, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Some people have difficulty telling the difference between something great and something they've simply heard of.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can't put the two together...”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

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

“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, Memoirs of a Geisha

“How many times already had I encountered the painful lesson that although we may wish for the barb to be pulled from our flesh, it leaves a welt that doesn't heal?”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“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, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Friendship is a precious thing, Sayuri. One mustn't throw it away.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“A woman who acts like a fool is a fool.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“I've lived my life again just telling it to you.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“We human beings are only a part of something very much larger. When we walk along, we may crush a beetle or simply cause a change in the air so that a fly ends up where it might never have gone otherwise. And if we think of the same example but with ourselves in the role of the insect, and the larger universe in the role we've just played, it's perfectly clear that we're affected every day by forces over which we have no more control than the poor beetle has over our gigantic foot as it descends upon it. What are we to do? 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

“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, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Seeing him again after so long awakened something inside me. I was surprised to find myself feeling sad rather than joyful, as I would have imagined.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Neither you nor I can know your destiny. You may never know it! Destiny isn't always like a party at the end of the evening. Sometimes it's nothing more than struggling through life from day to day.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“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, Memoirs of a Geisha