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.

— Arthur Golden

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

— Arthur Golden

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

— Arthur Golden

And then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped around my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

— Arthur Golden

And when I raised myself to look at the man who’d spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall.

— Arthur Golden

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.

— Arthur Golden

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

— 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.

— Arthur Golden

A woman who acts like a fool is a fool.

— Arthur Golden

But, Camera-san, I don’t want kindness!”“Don’t you? I thought we all wanted kindness. Perhaps what you mean is that you want something more than kindness. And that is something you’re in no position to ask.

— Arthur Golden