Arthur Golden Quotes

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.

This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes consume us completely.

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

We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.

We can never flee the misery that is within us.

Sometimes we get through adversity only by imagining what the world might be like if our dreams should ever come true.

If you keep your destiny in mind, every moment in life becomes an opportunity for moving closer to it.

I had to wonder if men were so blinded by beauty that they would feel privileged to live their lives with an actual demon, so long as it was a beautiful demon.

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

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

Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.

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.