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

— Arthur Golden

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.

— Arthur Golden

I cannot tell you what it is that guides us in this life; but for me, I fell toward the Chairman just as a stone must fall toward the earth. When I cut my lip and met Mr. Tanaka, when my mother died, and I was cruelly sold, it was all like a stream that falls over rocky cliffs before it can reach the ocean. Even now that he is gone I have him still, in the richness of my memories.

— Arthur Golden

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.

— Arthur Golden

If he couldn't forgive you for what you'd done, it was clear to me, he was never truly your destiny.

— Arthur Golden

If we rub a fabric too often, it will quickly grow threadbare; and Nob’s words had rasped against me so much, I could no longer maintain that finely lacquered surface Camera had always counseled me to hide behind.

— Arthur Golden

If you aren't the woman I think you are, then this isn't the world I thought it was.

— Arthur Golden

I knew even then that she was right. An en is a karmic bond lasting a lifetime. Nowadays, many people seem to believe their lives are entirely a matter of choice; but in my day we viewed ourselves as pieces of clay that forever show the fingerprints of everyone who has touched them. Nob's touch had made a deeper impression on me than most. No one could tell me whether he would be my ultimate destiny, but I had always sensed the en between us. Somewhere in the landscape of my life Nob would always be present. But could it really be that of all the lessons I'd learned, the hardest one lay just ahead of me? Would I really have to take each of my hopes and put them away where no one would ever see them again, where not even I would ever see them?

— Arthur Golden

I long ago developed a very practical smile, which I call my "Not smile" because it resembles a Not mask whose features are frozen. Its advantage is that men can interpret it however they want; you can imagine how often I've relied on it.

— Arthur Golden

I'm not sure if this will make sense to you, but I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction so that I no longer faced backward toward the past but forward toward the future. And now the question confronting me was this: What would the future be

— Arthur Golden