Arthur Golden Quotes

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.

If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.

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.

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.

Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.

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

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

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

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.

The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

When you want to break a board, cracking it in the middle is only the first step. Success comes when you bounce up and down with all your might until the board snaps in half

I long ago developed a very practical smile, which I call my "Noh smile" because it resembles a Noh mask whose features are frozen. Its advantage is that men can interpret it however they want; you can imagine how often I've relied on it.

A woman who acts like a fool is a fool.

After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.

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