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.
Interpretation
The quote reflects a yearning for a more just and compassionate world, contrasting with harsh realities.
In this quote, Arthur Golden captures a fleeting moment of hope and imagination, envisioning a world vastly different from the one filled with unfairness and exploitation. It points to the desire for kindness and justice, particularly in the context of personal relationships and societal norms that often allow for the commodification of individuals, such as fathers selling their daughters. This momentary vision serves as a critique of existing societal injustices, evoking a longing for change.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about social justice at a community meeting.
We all know that a winter scene, though it may be covered over one day, with even the trees dressed in shawls of snow, will be unrecognizable the following spring. Yet I never imagined such a thing could occur within our very selves.
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.
As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past.
The heart dies a slow death, shedding each hope like leaves until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.
He was like a song I'd heard once in fragments but had been singing in my mind ever since.
I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.
I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.
Coincidence obeys no laws and if it does we don't know what they are. Coincidence, if you'll permit me the simile, is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures. In that hurricane, in that osseous implosion, we find communion.
Well, the news is mostly about things that go wrong, right? It's about sensationalist incidents that happened today, instead of things that happen every day. So if you watch and follow a lot of the news, at the end of the day, you know exactly how the world is not working.
And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?
The greatest pride, or the greatest despondency, is the greatest ignorance of one's self.
Science will never be able to reduce the value of a sunset to arithmetic. Nor can it reduce friendship to formula. Laughter and love, pain and loneliness, the challenge of beauty and truth: these will always surpass the scientific mastery of nature.
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