Quotes from Arthur Golden

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.

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

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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

We can never flee the misery that is within us.

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

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?

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.