Quotes from Arthur Golden

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]

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

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

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?

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

You cannot say to the sun, 'More sun,' or to the rain, 'Less rain.' To a man, geisha can only be half a wife. We are the wives of nightfall. And yet, to learn kindness after so much unkindness, to understand that a little girl with more courage than she knew, would find her prayers were answered, can that not be called happiness? After all these are not the memoirs of an empress, nor of a queen. These are memoirs of another kind.

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.

This character's entirely invented, and the woman that I interviewed wouldn't recognize herself, or really anything about herself, in this book, which she hasn't read, because she doesn't read English.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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