Quotes from Arthur Golden

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

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

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?

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.

A woman who acts like a fool is a fool.

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

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

Seeing him again after so long awakened something inside me. I was surprised to find myself feeling sad rather than joyful, as I would have imagined.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.

A wounded tiger is a dangerous beast.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.