Aging & Wisdom Quote by Arthur Golden

Hope gets dressed up here as something decorative, optional, and ultimately incriminating. By comparing hopes to hair ornaments, Arthur Golden borrows a language of femininity that’s coded as “extra”: pretty things you add when you’re young, before the world teaches you to edit yourself. The sting is in the implied social rulebook. Girls “want to wear too many” not because they’re foolish, but because youth is allowed a kind of exuberant self-display. Old women “look silly wearing even one” because the culture treats aging female desire as an offense: don’t want too much, don’t show it, don’t ask the future for favors.

The line’s intent is not tender; it’s disciplinary. It frames hope as something you should outgrow, like glitter, and makes the loss of possibility feel like maturity rather than damage. That’s the subtext: hope isn’t just an inner feeling, it’s a public performance that gets policed. The metaphor also smuggles in a quiet cruelty about scarcity. If you’ve lived long enough, the quote suggests, your hopes should have been worn down by reality; keeping them becomes evidence you haven’t learned your place.

Context matters: Golden is best known for Memoirs of a Geisha, a novel steeped in aesthetics, training, and the way women’s lives can be shaped into pleasing surfaces for others. Read that way, the ornament image isn’t random; it’s a miniature of a whole system where a woman’s acceptable “future” narrows with age. The brilliance, and the bleakness, is how elegantly the sentence makes resignation look like good taste.