Arthur Golden

“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.”

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

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

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

“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 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 mot...”

“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 t...”

“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...”

“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 a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.”

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

“Never give up; for even rivers someday wash dams away.”

“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 tim...”

“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?”

“It is confusing, because in this culture we really don't have anything that corresponds to geisha.”