Quotes by Arthur Golden

Quotes from one of my favorite books - Memoirs of Geisha by Arthur Golden.

 

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.

How many times already had I encountered the painful lesson that although we may wish for the barb to be pulled from our flesh, it leaves a welt that doesn't heal?

At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

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.

 He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.
 

After all, when a stone is dropped into a pond, the water continues quivering even after the stone has sunk to the bottom.

I don't know when we will 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.

From this experience, I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn't there. What if I came to the end of my life and realized that I'd spent every day watching for a man who would never come to me? What an unbearable sorrow it would be, to realize I'd never really tasted the things I'd eaten, or seen the places I'd been, because I'd thought of nothing but the Chairman even while my life was drifting away from me. And yet if I drew my thoughts back from him, what life would I have? I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood for a performance she would never give.