Arthur Golden

“I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.”

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

“Once when I was a little child of six or so, I watched a spider spinning its web in a corner of the house. Before the spider had even finished its job, a mosquito flew right into the web and was trapped there. The spider didn't pay it any attention at first, but went on with what it was doing; only when it was finished did it creep over on its pointy toes and sting that poor mosquito to death. As I sat there on that wooden floor and watched Hatsumomo come reaching for me with her delicate fingers, I knew I was trapped in a web she had spun for me.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.”

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

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

“Couldn't the wrong sort of living turn anyone mean? I remembered very well that one day back in Yoroido, a boy pushed me into a thorn bush near the pond. By the time I clawed my way out I was mad enough to bite through wood. If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.”

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

“We human beings are only a part of something very much larger. When we walk along, we may crush a beetle or simply cause a change in the air so that a fly ends up where it might never 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 forces over which we have no more control than the poor beetle has over our gigantic foot as it descends upon it. What are we to do? We must use whatever methods we can to understand the movement of the universe around us and time our actions so that we are not fighting the currents, but moving with them.”

“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.”

“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.”