Top 150 Arthur Golden Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “Geisha is always called beautiful even if she is not.”

— Arthur Golden

55. “Occasionally in life we come upon things we can’t understand, because we have never seen anything similar.”

— Arthur Golden

56. “Some people have difficulty telling the difference between something great and something they’ve simply heard of.”

— Arthur Golden

57. “You seemed so desperate, like you might drown if someone didn’t save you.”

— Arthur Golden

58. “Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can’t put the two together...”

— Arthur Golden

59. “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

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

— Arthur Golden

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

— Arthur Golden

62. “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

63. “Of course, a sign doesn’t mean anything unless you know how to interpret it.”

— Arthur Golden

64. “I don’t like things held up before me that I cannot have.”

— Arthur Golden

65. “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.”

— Arthur Golden

66. “My feelings of disgust had been so loud within me, they’d nearly drowned out everything else.”

— Arthur Golden

67. “No one knows the author of memoir so well like himself.”

— Arthur Golden

68. “A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist’s world.”

— Arthur Golden

69. “A woman who acts like a fool is a fool.”

— Arthur Golden

70. “I didn’t say to act dead. I said act helpless.”

— Arthur Golden

71. “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

72. “Passion can quickly slip to jealousy, or even hatred.”

— Arthur Golden

73. “I’ve lived my life again just telling it to you.”

— Arthur Golden

74. “A geisha has studied a man’s moods and his seasons. She fusses and he blooms.”

— Arthur Golden

75. “Sadness was a very heavy thing.”

— Arthur Golden

76. “I fell into a sound sleep and dreamed that I was at a banquet back in Gion, talking with an elderly man who was explaining to me that his wife, whom he’d cared for deeply, wasn’t really dead because the pleasure of their time together lived on inside him.”

— Arthur Golden

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “Time your actions so you’re not fighting against the currents but moving with them.”

— Arthur Golden

81. “We human beings have a remarkable way of growing accustomed to things.”

— Arthur Golden

82. “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

83. “Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.”

— Arthur Golden

84. “Everyone knows that a wounded tiger is a dangerous beast.”

— Arthur Golden

85. “When a man takes a mistress, he doesn’t turn around and divorce his wife.”

— Arthur Golden

86. “Finally the homeless eel marked its territory, I suppose, and the Doctor lay heavily upon me, moist with sweat.”

— Arthur Golden

87. “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

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

— Arthur Golden

89. “Every step I have taken has been to bring myself closer to you.”

— Arthur Golden

90. “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

91. “If you aren’t the woman I think you are, then this isn’t the world I thought it was.”

— Arthur Golden

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

95. “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

96. “Every time I caught a glimpse of myself in the glass of a shop, I felt I was someone to be taken seriously; not a girl anymore, but a young woman.”

— Arthur Golden

97. “Remember, Chiyo, geisha are not courtesans. And we are not wives. We sell our skills, not our bodies. We create another secret world, a place only of beauty. The very word “geisha” means artist and to be a geisha is to be judged as a moving work of art.”

— Arthur Golden

98. “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.”

— Arthur Golden

99. “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.”

— Arthur Golden

100. “Every man has his destiny. But who needs to go to a fortune-teller to find it?”

— Arthur Golden