Quotes from Arthur Golden

All my hard work in overhearing it was it was about as rewarding to me as a man who lugs a chest up the hill only to learn that its full of rocks.

Is this how you act toward your honored guest? You must take him out onto the street and walk him around a bit to wake him up. The cold will do him good. He's lying in the snow. Isn't that cold enough?

Now, Chiyo, stumbling along in life is a poor way to proceed. You must learn how to find the time and place for things.

If we rub a fabric too often, it will quickly grow threadbare; and Nobu's words had rasped against me so much, I could no longer maintain that finely lacquered surface Mameha had always counseled me to hide behind.

I knew he noticed the tress, and the mud, and the children in the street, but I had no reason to believe he'd ever notice me.

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

Izdrži. To je jedino što bilo tko od nas može u?initi na ovome svijetu.

He lived in a world that was visible, even if it didn't always please him to be there.

When I said these words, all the heat in my body seemed to rise to my face. I felt I might float up into the air, just like a piece of ash from a fire.

Since the day I'd left Yoroido, I'd done nothing but worry that every turn of life's wheel would bring yet another obstacle into my path; and of course, it was the worrying and the struggle that had always made life so vividly real to me.

Could it really be that of all the lessons I'd learned, the hardest one lay just ahead of me? Would I really have to take each of my hopes and put them away where no one would ever see them again, where not even I would ever see them? Go back to the okiya, Sayuri, Mameha told me. Prepare for the evening ahead of you. There's nothing like work for getting over a disappointment.

People in the village often said she ought to have been extremely attractive, because her parents had been. Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can't put the two together; this was the terrible trick nature had played on her.

I won't say I'd never wondered what might happen if she should die; I did wonder about it, in the same way I wondered what might happen if our house were swallowed up in an earthquake. There could hardly be life after such an event.

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.

I've often observed that men and women who were young children during these years [of defeat in war] have a certain seriousness about them; there was too little laughter in their childhoods.

I had the sudden insight that nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.

When I unwrapped the moth from its funeral shroud, it was the same startlingly lovely creature as on the day I had entombed it. Everything about it seemed beautiful and perfect, and so utterly unchanged.

My existence was as unstable as a stream, changing in every way; but the moth was like a piece of stone, changing not at all.

Sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier.

Zar život nije ništa drugo do oluja koja stalno odnosi ono što je još samo trenutak ranije bilo tu i ostavlja za sobom tek nešto ogoljelo i neprepoznatljivo?

Every man has his destiny. But who needs to to go to a fortune-teller to find it? Do I go to a chef to find out if I'm hungry? Nobu

Tuga je vrlo neobi?an osje?aj, tako smo bespomo?ni kad se s njome suo?imo. To je nešto poput prozora koji se otvara po vlastitoj volji. Soba se hladi, a mi možemo samo bespomo?no drhtati.

Premda sam imala samo ?etrnaest godina, ?inilo mi se kao da sam ve? živjela dva života. Moj novi život još uvijek nije pravo zapo?eo, iako je moj stari život završio prije dosta vremena.

I lived in that contented state a long while before I was finally able to look back and admit how desolate my life had once been. I'm sure I could never have told my story otherwise; I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.