250 Quotes by Arthur Golden

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.

Pumpkin was a girl who looked as if she could grow fat quickly, given the chance.

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

We don’t become geisha because we want our lives to be happy; we become geisha because we have no choice.

Every step I have taken in my life since I was a child in Gion, I have taken in the hope of bringing myself closer to you.

I began to feel that all the people I’d ever known who had died or left me had not in fact gone away, but continued to live on inside me just as this man’s wife lived on inside him.

We all know that a winter scene, though it may be covered one day, with even the trees dressed in shawls of snow, will be unrecognizable the following spring.

I learned that year that nothing is so unpredictable as who will survive a war and who won’t.

Neither you nor I can know your destiny. You may never know it! Destiny isn’t always like a party at the end of the evening. Sometimes it’s nothing more than struggling through life from day to day.