"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. (Memoirs of a Geisha 348)"
— Arthur Golden

"If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was."
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"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 (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"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

"Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true."
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

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

"He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since."
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"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

"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. Page 105"
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"I dont think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it."
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"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 (Memoirs of a Geisha)

""The heart dies, a slow death,
shedding each hope like leaves...
... until one day there are
none. No hopes. Nothing remains.""
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"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 (Memoirs of a Geisha)

""A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course of victory"---Memoirs of a Geisha"
— Arthur Golden

"Whatever our struggles and triumphs, however we may suffer them, all too soon they bleed into a wash, just like watery ink on paper. (499)
"
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"From this experience, I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn't there. What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I'd spent every day watching for a man who would never come to me? What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realize I'd never really tasted the things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been, because I'd thought of nothing but the Chairman even while my life was drifting away from me. And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give. (349)"
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"I watched him walk away with sickness in my heart - though it was a pleasing kind of sickness, if such a thing exists. I mean to say that 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 (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"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 (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"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 (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"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 (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"We none of us find as much kindness in this world as we should."
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"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

"Of course, a sign doesn't mean anything unless you know how to interpret it"
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"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. "
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"All we can do is flow where the landscape of our lives carries us."
— 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

"Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one."
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"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 (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"Watch for the thing that will show itself to you. Because that thing, when you find it, will be your future."
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"We human beings are only a part of something very much larger. When we walk along, we may crush a beetle or simply cause a change in the air so that a fly ends up where it might never have gone otherwise. And if we think of the same example but with ourselves in the role of the insect, and the larger universe in the role we've just played, it's perfectly clear that we're affected every day by forces over which we have no more control than the poor beetle has over our gigantic foot as it descends upon it. What are we to do? 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

""We all know that a winter scene, though it may be covered one day, with even the trees dressed in shawls of snow, will be unrecognizable the following spring.""
— Arthur Golden

"Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see. "
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

""Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can't put the two together..." "
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"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

"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 (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"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."
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"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

"...to see 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. Page 369"
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"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. "
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"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 (Memoirs of a Geisha)

""Oh I'm sure you're right," Auntie said. "Probably she's just as you say. But she looks to me like a very clever girl, and adaptable; you can see that from the shape of her ears."


Memoirs of a Geisha"
— Arthur Golden

"The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves, until one day there are none."
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"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 (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"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 (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"Adversity is like a strong wind. I don't mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise want to 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

"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 (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"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 (Memoirs of a Geisha)

"Occasionally in life we come upon things we can't understand, because we have never seen anything similar."
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)

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

"I'm not sure this will make sense to you, but I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction, so that I no longer faced backward toward the past, but forward toward the future. And now the question confronting me was this: What would that future be? The moment this question formed in my mind, I knew with as much certainty as I'd ever known anything that sometime during that day I would receive a sign. This was why the bearded man had opened the window in my dream. He was saying to me, "Watch for the thing that will show itself to you. Because that thing, when you find it, will be your future."
— Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha)