Arthur Golden
Passion can quickly slip to jealousy, or even hatred.Collection: Jealousy
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.Collection: Famous
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.Collection: Morning
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.
We can never flee the misery that is within us.
I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.
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.
This time all the historical details and things were right. But I'd written it again in third person, and people found it dry. I decided to throw that one away.
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.
This character's entirely invented, and the woman that I interviewed wouldn't recognize herself, or really anything about herself, in this book, which she hasn't read, because she doesn't read English.
What I had to do was keep the story within certain limits of what was, of course, plausible.
I worried she might spend an afternoon chatting with me about the sights and then wish me best of luck.
I don't like things held up before me that I cannot have.
Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.
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.
Adversity is like a strong wind. I don't mean just that it holds us back from places we might otherwise go. It also tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that afterward we see ourselves as we really are.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Life
Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.Collection: Simple
I never seek to defeat the man I am fighting, " he explained. "I seek to defeat his confidence. A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course to victory. Two men are equals - true equals - only when they both have equal confidence.Collection: Confidence
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.Collection: Inspirational
If you keep your destiny in mind, every moment in life becomes an opportunity for moving closer to it.Collection: Moving
A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course of victory.Collection: Inspirational
Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.Collection: Grief
I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Feelings
Anyone can have a good day. The question is what do you do on a bad day. That's when you're being tested. In a very tangible sense, a bad day shows your innermost essence more than a good day.Collection: Good Day
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.Collection: Death
My mother once told me I was like water. Water can carve its way even through stone. And when trapped, water makes a new path.Collection: Mother
Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.Collection: Dream
When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.Collection: Fighting
After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.Collection: Fear
He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.Collection: Song
I stumbled out into the courtyard to try to flee my misery, but of course we can never flee the misery that is within us.Collection: Sad
I had to wonder if men were so blinded by beauty that they would feel privileged to live their lives with an actual demon, so long as it was a beautiful demon.Collection: Beautiful
Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.Collection: Real
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.Collection: Children
The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.Collection: Hope
Watch for the thing that will show itself to you. Because that thing, when you find it, will be your future.Collection: Watches
I didn't say to act dead. I said act helpless.Collection: Said
I can see you have a great deal of water in your personality. 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 a 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 And yet, you haven't drawn on those strengths in living your life, have you?Collection: Fire
A geisha has studied a man's moods and his seasons. She fusses and he blooms.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Feelings
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.Collection: Grateful
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.Collection: Sleep
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.Collection: Grief
Friendship is a precious thing, Sayuri. One mustn't throw it away.Collection: Precious Things
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.Collection: Giving
of course the pace of change never slows, even when we've convinced ourselves it will.Collection: Pace