Arthur Golden > Quotes

“I'm not sure this will make sense to you, but I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction, so that I no longer faced backward toward the past, but forward toward the future. And now the question confronting me was this: What would that future be? The moment this question formed in my mind, I knew with as much certainty as I'd ever known anything that sometime during that day I would receive a sign. This was why the bearded man had opened the window in my dream. He was saying to me, "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

“At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.”
― Arthur Golden

“You seemed so desperate, like you might drown if someone didn't save you.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“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, Memoirs of a Geisha

“A wounded tiger is a dangerous beast.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“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

“When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“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, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Couldn't the wrong sort of living turn anyone mean? I remembered very well that one day back in Yoroido, a boy pushed me into a thorn bush near the pond. By the time I clawed my way out I was mad enough to bite through wood. If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“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.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Nothing like work for getting over a disappointment.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“When a man takes a mistress, he doesn't turn around and divorce his wife.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“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, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Here you are...A beautiful girl with nothing to be ashamed of...And yet you are afraid to look at me. Someone has been cruel to you...Or perhaps life has been cruel.
"I don't know sir" I said, Though of course I knew perfectly well.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“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

“What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realized I'd never really tasted to things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been. What life would I have? I would be like the dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Water never waits. It changes shape and floes around things, and finds the secret paths no one else thought about __ the tiny hole through the roof or the bottom of a 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 can sweep it away. Even wood, which is its natural complement, can'survive without being nurtured by water.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“I didn't say to act dead. I said act helpless.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“We human beings have a remarkable way of growing accustomed to things.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“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, Memoirs of a Geisha

“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, Memoirs of a Geisha

“If he couldn't forgive you for what you'd done, it was clear to me he was never truly your destiny.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Every step I have taken has been to bring myself closer to you.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“Never give up; for even rivers someday wash dams away.”
― Arthur Golden

“I expect you to go through life with your eyes open! If you keep your
destiny in mind, every moment in life becomes an opportunity for moving closer to it.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“A geisha has studied a man's moods and his seasons. She fusses and he blooms.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“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.”
― Arthur Golden

“I fell into a sound sleep and dreamed that I was at a banquet back in Gion, talking with an elderly man who was explaining to me that his wife, whom he'd cared for deeply, wasn't really dead because the pleasure of their time together lived on inside him.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“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. Weren't these the very American soldiers we'd 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.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha