Arthur Golden quotes:

I studied Japanese language and culture in college and graduate school, and afterward went to work in Tokyo, where I met a young man whose father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha. He and I never discussed his parentage, which was an open secret, but it fascinated me.

Never give up; for even rivers someday wash dams away.

I worried she might spend an afternoon chatting with me about the sights and then wish me best of luck.

You know, the men go to tea houses with the expectation that they will have a nice quiet evening and not read about it the next morning in the newspaper.

Geisha because when I was living in Japan, I met a fellow whose mother was a geisha, and I thought that was kind of fascinating and ended up reading about the subject just about the same time I was getting interested in writing fiction.

Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.

As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.

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.

I don't know when we'll 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.

Geisha is always called beautiful even if she is not.

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.

My tears simply broke through the fragile wallthat had held them, and with a terrible feeling of shame, I laid my head upon the table and let them drain out of me.

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

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

It was what we Japanese called the onion life, peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while.

What I really wanted to know, though, was what it was like to be a geisha? Where do you sleep? What do you eat? How do you have your hair done?

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

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?

This time all the historical details and things were right. But I'd written it again in third person, and people found it dry. I decided to throw that one away.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

A geisha has studied a man's moods and his seasons. She fusses and he blooms.

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

Anyone can have a good day. The question is what do you do on a bad day. That's when you're being tested. In a very tangible sense, a bad day shows your innermost essence more than a good day.

I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.

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."

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

Now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean. Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper.

A woman who acts like a fool is a fool.

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 the future be

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 I've relied on it.

I understood that he left me at the end of his long life just as naturally as the leaves fall from the trees.

Can't you see? Every step I have taken, since I was that child on the bridge, has been to bring myself closer to you.

If he couldn't forgive you for what you'd done, it was clear to me he was never truly your destiny.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

What I had to do was keep the story within certain limits of what was, of course, plausible.

When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.

A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course of victory.

We can never flee the misery that is within us.

It is confusing, because in this culture we really don't have anything that corresponds to geisha.

I never seek to defeat the man I am fighting, " he explained. "I seek to defeat his confidence. A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course to victory. Two men are equals - true equals - only when they both have equal confidence.

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

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

Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.

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.

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

Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.

Water is powerful. It can wash away earth, put out fire, and even destroy iron.

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

My mother once told me I was like water. Water can carve its way even through stone. And when trapped, water makes a new path.

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.

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

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

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.

I don't like things held up before me that I cannot have.

Time your actions so you're not fighting against the currents but moving with them.

Memoirs give the knowledge about the author and his environment. They are different from biography. Memoirs do not get ahead, and the man who writes a biography looks at his future like at a very simple thing.

We human beings have a remarkable way of growing accustomed to things.

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.

It's less a matter of looking the other way than of closing our eyes to what we can't stop from happening.

Sadness was a very heavy thing.

The prettiest of them all is a girl who is pretty on the inside.

Friendship is a precious thing, Sayuri. One mustn't throw it away.

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

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.

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.

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

Nothing is as bleak as the future, except the past.

It's your duty to use what influence you have, unless you want to drift through life like a fish belly-up on the stream" "I wish I could believe that life really is something more than a stream that carries us along, belly-up" "Alright, if it's a stream, you're still free to be in this part of it or that part, aren't you? The water will divide again and again. If you bump, and tussle, and fight, and make use of whatever advantages you might have-" "Oh, that's fine, I'm sure, when you have advantages." "You'd find them everywhere, if you ever bothered to look!

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

No one knows the author of memoir so well like himself.

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

Passion can quickly slip to jealousy, or even hatred.

A wounded tiger is a dangerous beast.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.

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?

I didn't say to act dead. I said act helpless.

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.

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.

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.

From this experience, I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn't there. What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I'd spent every day watching for a man who would never come to me? What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realize I'd never really tasted the things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been, because I'd thought of nothing but the Chairman even while my life was drifting away from me. And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

You seemed so desperate, like you might drown if someone didn't save you.

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.

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. [Mameha]

I've lived my life again just telling it to you.

In the instant before the door opened, I could almost sense my life expanding just like a river whose waters have begun to swell; for I had never before taken such a drastic step to change the course of my own future. I was like a child tiptoeing along a precipice overlooking the sea. And yet somehow I hadn't imagined a great wave might come and strike me there, and wash everything away.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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