Quotes from Arthur Golden

The corridor couldn't have smelled more strongly of fish guts if we had actually been inside a fish.

Ali svaki put kad osjetim potrebu da se podsjetim na to kako na svijetu postoji ljepota i dobrota, mislit ?u na tebe.

Što ako do?em do kraja života i shvatim kako sam iz dana u dan o?ekivala ?ovjeka koji nikad nije došao? Postat ?u poput plesa?ice koja se od djetinstva priprema za predstavu u kojoj nikad ne?e nastupati.

razgovaram s jednim starijim muškarcem koji mi objašnjava kako njegova žena, nije doista mrtva, jer zadovoljstva iz vremena koje su proveli zajedno i dalje žive u njemu.

This was what we Japanese called the "onion life"—peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while.

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.

Suppose that you and I were sitting in a quiet room overlooking a garden, chatting and sipping at our cups of green tea while we talked about something that had happened a long while ago, and I said to you, "That afternoon when I met so-and-so . . . was the very best afternoon of my life, and also the very worst afternoon.

Adversity is like a strong wind. I don't mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are, and not merely as we might like to be.

Water never waits. It changes shape and flows around things, and finds the secret paths no one else has thought about -- the tiny hole through the roof or the bottom of the box. There's no doubt it's the most versatile of the five elements. It can wash away earth; it can put out fire; it can wear a piece of metal down and sweep it away. Even wood, which is its natural complement, can't survive without being nurtured by water.

I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.

Ninguno de nosotros encuentra en este mundo todo el cariño que deberíamos.

We topped the ridge a few moments later, and the town of Senzuru came into view below us. The day was drab, everything in shades of gray. It was my first look at the world outside Yoroido, and I didn't think I'd missed much. I could see the thatched roofs of the town around an inlet, amid dull hills, and beyond them the metal-colored sea, broken with shards of white. Inland, the landscape might have been attractive but for the train tracks running across it like a scar.

I was hardly worthy of these surroundings. And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped about my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

I never seek to defeat the man I am fighting," he explained. "I seek to defeat his confidence. A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course to victory. Two men are equals—true equals—only when they both have equal confidence.

The world was simply too cruel; how could I survive?

I have never read anything quite like Mark Haddon's funny and agonizingly honest book, or encountered a narrator more vivid and memorable. I advise you to buy two copies; you won't want to lend yours out.

But 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.

Kakve god bile naše muke i naše pobede, kako god ih mi propratili, sve one vrlo brzo izblede, kao mastilo na papiru.

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 truly are.

At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of melancholy.

To me, he seemed to see the sap bleeding from the trunks of the pine trees, and the circle of brightness in the sky where the sun was smothered by clouds.

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

I'm sure there are a great many things I don't know about these women in their splendid dresses, but I often have the feeling that without their wealthy husbands or boyfriends, many of them would be struggling to get by and might not bare the same proud opinions of themselves. And of course, the same thing is true for a first-class Geisha.

Because I'd lived through adversity once before, what I learned about myself was like a reminder of something I'd once known but had nearly forgotten-namely, that beneath the elegant clothing, and the accomplished dancing, and the clever conversation, my life had no complexity at all, but was as simple as a stone falling toward the ground. My whole purpose in everything during the past ten years had been to win the affections of the Chairman.