250 Quotes by Arthur Golden

Well, a peach has a lovely taste and so does a mushroom, but you can’t put the two together...

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.

We human beings are only part of something much larger. When we walk along we may crush a battle or simply cause a change in the air so that a fly ends up where it might not 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 races over which we have no control than the poor beetle has over our gigantic foot as it descends upon it.

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, and not merely as we might like to be.

I’d done nothing but worry that every turn of life’s wheel would bring yet another obstacle into my path; and of course, it was the worrying and the struggle that had always made life so vividly real to me. When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.

A geisha has studied a man’s moods and his seasons. She fusses and he blooms.

The very idea!” he said, with another big laugh. “You, growing up in a dump like Yoroido. That’s like making tea in a bucket!

Some people have difficulty telling the difference between something great and something they’ve simply heard of.

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.