Arthur Golden Quotes

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 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.

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.

Even now that he is gone I have him still, in the richness of my memories. I've lived my life again just telling it to you.

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

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

To the eyes of the American soldiers who drove past, I looked no different from the women around me; and as I thought of it, who could say I was any different? If you no longer have leaves, or bark, or roots, can you go on calling yourself a tree? "I am a peasant," I said to myself, "and not a geisha at all any longer." It was a frightening feeling to look at my hands and see their roughness. To draw my mind away from my fears, I turned my attention again to the truckloads of soldiers driving past. Weren't these the very American soldiers we'd been taught to hate, who had bombed our cities with such horrifying weapons? Now they rode through our neighborhood, throwing pieces of candy to the children.

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