Arthur Golden

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

I long ago developed a very practical smile, which I call my "Noh smile" because it resembles a Noh 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.

Passion can quickly slip to jealousy, or even hatred.

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

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.

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.

He stood with his two frail hands on his cane and his eyes closed, and breathed in deeply the scent of the past. "Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.

Since the day I__ left Yoroido, I__ done nothing but worry that every turn of life__ wheel would bring yet another obstacle into my path; and of course, it was the worrying and the struggle that had always made life so vividly real to me.

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.

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.

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.

Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.

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.

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

For a flicker of a moment I imagined a world completely different from the one I'd always known, a world in which I was treated with fairness, even kindness-- a world in which fathers didn't sell their daughters.

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.

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

A woman who acts like a fool is a fool.