Arthur Golden Quotes - Page 2

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

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

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.

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

A woman who acts like a fool is a fool.

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

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.

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

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.

Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.

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.

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.

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

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.

Passion can quickly slip to jealousy, or even hatred.

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

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.

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

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

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

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]

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.

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

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.

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