Arthur Golden Quotes & Sayings

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.”

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

“We can never flee the misery that is within us.”

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

“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?”

“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.”