Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the resilience of the human spirit in overcoming challenges.
In this quote, Arthur Golden expresses a profound realization about survival after facing a difficult experience. The initial shock may leave one feeling vulnerable, but with time, individuals often discover their inner strength and ability to endure, marking a transformative moment in their journey through adversity.
In practice
This quote could inspire someone going through a tough time in a motivational speech.
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.
The oppressed never free themselves - they do not have the necessary strengths.
In professional work - certainly in the arts and graphics - 99% of people have zero courage. They blow with the wind.
Now I have shed my first blood. I feel no qualms, no pride, no remorse. There is only a weary indifference that will follow me throughout the war.
Fear and God do not occupy the same space.
I had insecurities and fears like everybody does, and I got over it. But I was interested in the parts of me that struggled with those things.
Loyalty and obedience to wisdom and justice are fine; but it is still finer to defy arbitrary power, unjustly and cruelly used--not on behalf of ourselves, but on behalf of others more helpless.
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