Sometimes," he sighed, "I think the things I remember are more real than the things I see.
Interpretation
Memory can feel more substantial than reality itself.
In this quote, Arthur Golden reflects on the nature of memory and perception, suggesting that our recollections can sometimes hold more significance or reality than the current experiences we encounter. This speaks to the deeply personal and subjective nature of memory, where the past can shape our understanding of the present in profound ways.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of storytelling, one might quote this to emphasize how memories shape narratives.
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.
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.
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.
A sense of the universe, a sense of the all, the nostalgia which seizes us when confronted by nature, beauty, music - these seem to be an expectation and awareness of a Great Presence.
Racial prejudice, anti-Semitism, or hatred of anyone with different beliefs has no place in the human mind or heart.
Anarchism...stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral.
Our collective future depends on opening channels of compassion, acceptance, and understanding of others.
The Right insists that anyone can escape poverty by working hard but that is simply not the case.
In order to get the power and retain it, it is necessary to love power; but love of power is not connected with goodness, but with qualities which are the opposite of goodness, such as pride, cunning, cruelty.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.