110+ Arthur Golden Quotes On Education, Epic And Intimate

Arthur Golden is an American writer best known for his 1997 novel Memoirs of a Geisha. It was an international bestseller that was adapted into a 2005 film of the same name. He has also written two other novels, The River of Heaven and The Painted Kiss. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Arthur Golden on education, love, epic.

Top 10 Arthur Golden Quotes

1. We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.
2. I worried she might spend an afternoon chatting with me about the sights and then wish me best of luck.
3. After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.
4. We don't become geisha because we want our lives to be happy; we become geisha because we have no choice.
5. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.
6. 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.
7. If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.
8. He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.
9. The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.
10. 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.

Arthur Golden Short Quotes

• When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.
• Water is powerful. It can wash away earth, put out fire, and even destroy iron.
• We none of us find as much kindness in this world as we should.
• Of course, a sign doesn't mean anything unless you know how to interpret it.
• Sadness was a very heavy thing.
• I don't like things held up before me that I cannot have.
• It is confusing, because in this culture we really don't have anything that corresponds to geisha.
• Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can't put the two together.
• of course the pace of change never slows, even when we've convinced ourselves it will.
• A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.

Arthur Golden Quotes About Geisha

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. — Arthur Golden

I don't know when we'll see each other again or what the world will be like when we do. We may both have seen many horrible things. But I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world. — Arthur Golden

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. — Arthur Golden

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. — Arthur Golden

Can't you see? Every step I have taken, since I was that child on the bridge, has been to bring myself closer to you. — Arthur Golden

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

Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true. — Arthur Golden

Even stone can be worn down with enough rain. — Arthur Golden

I had to wonder if men were so blinded by beauty that they would feel privileged to live their lives with an actual demon, so long as it was a beautiful demon. — Arthur Golden

I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world. — Arthur Golden

Arthur Golden Quotes About Read

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. — Arthur Golden

You know, the men go to tea houses with the expectation that they will have a nice quiet evening and not read about it the next morning in the newspaper. — Arthur Golden

At the temple there is a poem called Loss carved into the stone. It has three words, but the poet has scratched them out. You cannot read loss, only feel it. — Arthur Golden

Arthur Golden Quotes About Tears

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. — Arthur Golden

My tears simply broke through the fragile wallthat had held them, and with a terrible feeling of shame, I laid my head upon the table and let them drain out of me. — Arthur Golden

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. — Arthur Golden

Arthur Golden Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it. — Arthur Golden

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. — Arthur Golden

But what I could see out of the corner of my eye made me think of two lovely bundles of silk floating along a stream. In a moment they were hovering on the walkway in front of me, where they sank down and smoothed their kimono across their knees. — Arthur Golden

Anyone can have a good day. The question is what do you do on a bad day. That's when you're being tested. In a very tangible sense, a bad day shows your innermost essence more than a good day. — 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] — Arthur Golden

Watch for the thing that will show itself to you. Because that thing, when you find it, will be your future. — Arthur Golden

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. — Arthur Golden

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. — Arthur Golden

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. — Arthur Golden

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

If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even a stone can be worn down with enough rain. — Arthur Golden

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? — Arthur Golden

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 — Arthur Golden

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. — Arthur Golden

For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I'd always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness-- a world in which fathers didn't sell their daughters. — Arthur Golden

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? — Arthur Golden

My mother once told me I was like water. Water can carve its way even through stone. And when trapped, water makes a new path. — Arthur Golden

His face was very heavily creased, and into each crease he had tucked some worry or other, so that it wasn't really his face any longer, but more like a tree that had nests of birds in all of the branches. He had to struggle constantly to manage it and always looked worn out from the effort. — Arthur Golden

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. — Arthur Golden

This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes they consume us completely. — Arthur Golden

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. — Arthur Golden

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. — Arthur Golden

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? — Arthur Golden

What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realized I'd never really tasted to things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been. What life would I have? I would be like the dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give. — Arthur Golden

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

No one knows the author of memoir so well like himself. — Arthur Golden

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 — Arthur Golden

A woman who acts like a fool is a fool. — Arthur Golden

In the instant before the door opened, I could almost sense my life expanding just like a river whose waters have begun to swell; for I had never before taken such a drastic step to change the course of my own future. I was like a child tiptoeing along a precipice overlooking the sea. And yet somehow I hadn't imagined a great wave might come and strike me there, and wash everything away. — Arthur Golden

We all know that a winter scene, though it may be covered over one day, with even the trees dressed in shawls of snow, will be unrecognizable the following spring. Yet I never imagined such a thing could occur within our very selves. — Arthur Golden

I didn't say to act dead. I said act helpless. — Arthur Golden

I studied Japanese language and culture in college and graduate school, and afterward went to work in Tokyo, where I met a young man whose father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha. — Arthur Golden

My feelings of disgust had been so loud within me, they’d nearly drowned out everything else. — Arthur Golden

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

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

Memoirs give the knowledge about the author and his environment. They are different from biography. Memoirs do not get ahead, and the man who writes a biography looks at his future like at a very simple thing. — Arthur Golden

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. — Arthur Golden

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

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 — Arthur Golden

Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine. — Arthur Golden

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

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. — Arthur Golden

Time your actions so you're not fighting against the currents but moving with them. — Arthur Golden

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. — Arthur Golden

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

We human beings have a remarkable way of growing accustomed to things. — Arthur Golden

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. — Arthur Golden

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. — Arthur Golden

A mouse who wishes to fool the cat doesn't simply scamper out of its hole whenever it feels the slightest urge. — Arthur Golden

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. — Arthur Golden

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

Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us-so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe. — Arthur Golden

I cannot tell you what it is that guides us in this life; but for me, I fell toward the Chairman just as a stone must fall toward the earth. When I cut my lip and met Mr. Tanaka, when my mother died and I was cruelly sold, it was all like a stream that falls over rocky cliffs before it can reach the ocean. Even now that he is gone I have him still, in the richness of my memories. — Arthur Golden

You seemed so desperate, like you might drown if someone didn't save you. — Arthur Golden

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. — Arthur Golden

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? — Arthur Golden

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. — Arthur Golden

A wounded tiger is a dangerous beast. — Arthur Golden

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. — Arthur Golden

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. — Arthur Golden

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

Finally the homeless eel marked its territory, I suppose, and the Doctor lay heavily upon me, moist with sweat. — Arthur Golden

Geisha is always called beautiful even if she is not. — Arthur Golden

Nothing is as bleak as the future, except the past. — Arthur Golden

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. — Arthur Golden

It's less a matter of looking the other way than of closing our eyes to what we can't stop from happening. — Arthur Golden

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

I tried to continue, but somehow my throat made up its mind to swallow – though I can’t think what I was swallowing, unless it was a little knot of emotion I pushed back down because there was no room in my face for any more. — Arthur Golden

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

Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see. — Arthur Golden

This time all the historical details and things were right. But I'd written it again in third person, and people found it dry. I decided to throw that one away. — Arthur Golden

The prettiest of them all is a girl who is pretty on the inside. — Arthur Golden

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

Life Lessons by Arthur Golden

1. Arthur Golden's work emphasizes the importance of understanding and appreciating other cultures, as seen in his novel Memoirs of a Geisha.
2. His writing also highlights the power of resilience and determination in the face of adversity, as his characters often struggle to overcome difficult circumstances.
3. Finally, Golden's work demonstrates the value of learning from the past and using it to shape the future.