Top 150 Arthur Golden Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “He stood with his two frail hands on his cane and his eyes closed, and breathed in deeply the scent of the past. “Sometimes,” he sighed, “I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.”

— Arthur Golden

103. “Un equilibrio entre lo bueno y lo malo puede abrir las puertas del destino.”

— Arthur Golden

104. “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

105. “The very idea!” he said, with another big laugh. “You, growing up in a dump like Yoroido. That’s like making tea in a bucket!”

— Arthur Golden

106. “Some days the Arashinos’ little grandson, Juntaro, cried from hunger – which is when Mr. Arashino usually decided to sell a kimono from his collection. This was what we Japanese called the “onion life” – peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while.”

— Arthur Golden

107. “We human beings are only part of something much larger. When we walk along we may crush a battle or simply cause a change in the air so that a fly ends up where it might not 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 races over which we have no control than the poor beetle has over our gigantic foot as it descends upon it.”

— Arthur Golden

108. “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

109. “When I said these words, all the heat in my body seemed to rise to my face. I felt I might float up into the air, just like a piece of ash from a fire.”

— Arthur Golden

110. “The corridor couldn’t have smelled more strongly of fish guts if we had actually been inside a fish.”

— Arthur Golden

111. “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.”

— Arthur Golden

112. “I would’ve had an easier time if my emotions had all pulled me in the same direction, but it wasn’t so simple. I’d been blown about like a scrap of paper in the wind.”

— Arthur Golden

113. “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

114. “I knew he noticed the tress, and the mud, and the children in the street, but I had no reason to believe he’d ever notice me.”

— Arthur Golden

115. “And yet when his death happened only a few months later, I understood that he left me at the end of his long life just as naturally as the leaves fall from the trees.”

— Arthur Golden

116. “Sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier.”

— Arthur Golden

117. “Only when she sits before her mirror to apply her makeup with care does she become a geisha. And I don’t mean that this is when she begins to look like one. This is when she begins to think like one too.”

— Arthur Golden

118. “I understood that he left me at the end of his long life just as naturally as the leaves fall from the trees.”

— Arthur Golden

119. “I learned that year that nothing is so unpredictable as who will survive a war and who won’t.”

— Arthur Golden

120. “Since the day I’d left Yoroido, 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.”

— Arthur Golden

121. “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

122. “When I unwrapped the moth from its funeral shroud, it was the same startlingly lovely creature as on the day I had entombed it. Everything about it seemed beautiful and perfect, and so utterly unchanged.”

— Arthur Golden

123. “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

124. “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

125. “The world was simply too cruel; how could I survive?”

— Arthur Golden

126. “People in the village often said she ought to have been extremely attractive, because her parents had been. Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can’t put the two together; this was the terrible trick nature had played on her.”

— Arthur Golden

127. “We can’t waste our time thinking about such things,” she said. “Nothing is bleaker than the future, except perhaps the past.”

— Arthur Golden

128. “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

129. “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. He and I never discussed his parentage, which was an open secret, but it fascinated me.”

— Arthur Golden

130. “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. – Chapter 2, pg 20.”

— Arthur Golden

131. “My existence was as unstable as a stream, changing in every way; but the moth was like a piece of stone, changing not at all.”

— Arthur Golden

132. “If he couldn’t forgive you for what you’d done, it was clear to me he was never truly your destiny.”

— Arthur Golden

133. “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.”

— Arthur Golden

134. “I worried she might spend an afternoon chatting with me about the sights and then wish me best of luck.”

— Arthur Golden

135. “This humble person has been alive long enough to see two generations of children grow up, and knows how rare it is for ordinary birds to give birth to a swan. 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 into the world.”

— Arthur Golden

136. “Even now that he is gone I have him still, in the richness of my memories. I’ve lived my life again just telling it to you.”

— Arthur Golden

137. “Now, Chiyo, stumbling along in life is a poor way to proceed. You must learn how to find the time and place for things.”

— Arthur Golden

138. “I can tolerate his company for about half an hour. After that I am not responsible for the things I say!”

— Arthur Golden

139. “A woman living in a grand house may pride herself on all her lovely things; but the moment she hears the crackle of fire she decides very quickly which are the few she values the most.”

— Arthur Golden

140. “Of course I was happy to sit and listen, but I understood perfectly well that the Chairman wasn’t telling these things to me because he wanted me to know them. He was clearing them from his mind, just like draining water from a bucket. So I listened closely not to his words, but to the tone of his voice; because in the same way that sound rises as a bucket is emptied, I could hear the Chairman’s voice softening as he spoke.”

— Arthur Golden

141. “But really, would Yoroido seem any less exotic if I went back there again? As a young girl I believed my life would never have been a struggle if Mr. Tanaka hadn’t torn me away from my tipsy house. 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

142. “Two men are equals – true equals – only when they both have equal confidence.”

— Arthur Golden

143. “My goodness, Sayuri, you do look like a peasant!” he said.”

— Arthur Golden

144. “I won’t say I’d never wondered what might happen if she should die; I did wonder about it, in the same way I wondered what might happen if our house were swallowed up in an earthquake. There could hardly be life after such an event.”

— Arthur Golden

145. “I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.”

— Arthur Golden

146. “Every step I have taken in my life since I was a child in Gion, I have taken in the hope of bringing myself closer to you.”

— Arthur Golden

147. “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

148. “He smelled like the sea even after he had bathed. When he wasn’t fishing, he sat on the floor in our dark front room mending a fishing net. And if a fishing net had been a sleeping creature, he wouldn’t even have awakened it, at the speed he worked. He did everything this slowly.”

— Arthur Golden

149. “I won’t say my emotions had settled themselves by the time the train pulled into Kyoto Station early the following morning. After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.”

— Arthur Golden

150. “Pumpkin was a girl who looked as if she could grow fat quickly, given the chance.”

— Arthur Golden