Arthur Golden Quotes

I stumbled out into the courtyard to try to flee my misery, but of course we can never flee the misery that is within us.

~ Arthur Golden

I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulling me down toward them.

~ Arthur Golden

Sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier.

~ Arthur Golden

My tears simply broke through the fragile wallthat had held them, and with a terrible feeling of shame, I laid my head upon the table and let them drain out of me.

~ Arthur Golden

Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.

~ Arthur Golden

Couldn't the wrong sort of living turn anyone mean? I remembered very well that one day back in Yoroido, a boy pushed me into a thorn bush near the pond. By the time I clawed my way out I was mad enough to bite through wood. If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.

~ Arthur Golden

I never seek to defeat the man I am fighting, he explained. I seek to defeat his confidence. A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course to victory. Two men are equals - true equals - only when they both have equal confidence.

~ Arthur Golden

When I said these words, all the heat in my body seemed to rise to my face. I felt I might float up into the air, just like a piece of ash from a fire.

~ Arthur Golden

I would've had an easier time if my emotions had all pulled me in the same direction, but it wasn't so simple. I'd been blown about like a scrap of paper in the wind.

~ Arthur Golden

A woman who acts like a fool is a fool.

~ Arthur Golden

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

Since the day I’d left Yoroido, I’d done nothing but worry that every turn of life’s 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.

~ 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

Passion can quickly slip to jealousy, or even hatred.

~ Arthur Golden