ARTHUR GOLDEN

Adversity is like a strong wind. It tears away from us all but the things that cannot be torn, so that we see ourselves as we really are.

I worried she might spend an afternoon chatting with me about the sights and then wish me best of luck.

This time all the historical details and things were right. But I'd written it again in third person, and people found it dry. I decided to throw that one away.

This character's entirely invented, and the woman that I interviewed wouldn't recognize herself, or really anything about herself, in this book, which she hasn't read, because she doesn't read English.

What I really wanted to know, though, was what it was like to be a geisha? Where do you sleep? What do you eat? How do you have your hair done?

It is confusing, because in this culture we really don't have anything that corresponds to geisha.

You know, the men go to tea houses with the expectation that they will have a nice quiet evening and not read about it the next morning in the newspaper.

Geisha because when I was living in Japan, I met a fellow whose mother was a geisha, and I thought that was kind of fascinating and ended up reading about the subject just about the same time I was getting interested in writing fiction.

Passion can quickly slip to jealousy, or even hatred.

Never give up; for even rivers someday wash dams away.

We can never flee the misery that is within us.

I studied Japanese language and culture in college and graduate school, and afterward went to work in Tokyo, where I met a young man whose father was a famous businessman and whose mother was a geisha. He and I never discussed his parentage, which was an open secret, but it fascinated me.

Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.

I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.

I don't like things held up before me that I cannot have.

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.

What I had to do was keep the story within certain limits of what was, of course, plausible.

Time your actions so you're not fighting against the currents but moving with them.

Water is powerful. It can wash away earth, put out fire, and even destroy iron.

The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.

I tried to continue, but somehow my throat made up its mind to swallow – though I can’t think what I was swallowing, unless it was a little knot of emotion I pushed back down because there was no room in my face for any more.

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

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

If Mother and Mameha couldn't come to an agreement, I would remain a maid all my life just as surely as a turtle remains a turtle

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.