250 Quotes by Arthur Golden

Of course I was happy to sit and listen, but I understood perfectly well that the Chairman wasn’t telling these things to me because he wanted me to know them. He was clearing them from his mind, just like draining water from a bucket. So I listened closely not to his words, but to the tone of his voice; because in the same way that sound rises as a bucket is emptied, I could hear the Chairman’s voice softening as he spoke.

Those of us with water in our personalities don’t pick where we’ll flow to. All we can do is flow where the landscape of our lives carries us.

I had the sudden insight that nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.

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.

I don’t know when we’ll 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.

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

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.

I won’t say my emotions had settled themselves by the time the train pulled into Kyoto Station early the following morning. 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 think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.