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.
The seeker's silence is the loudest form of prayer.
To attempt the destruction of our passions is the height of folly. What a noble aim is that of the zealot who tortures himself like a madman in order to desire nothing, love nothing, feel nothing, and who, if he succeeded, would end up a complete monster!
If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete. And with all that, who is there who believes in vampires?
Climbing is not a competition, and you cannot talk in terms of 'greatest,' it means nothing.
Language should almost break up or explode in its fruitless effort to contain so many meanings.
What does it mean to be born? After we die, will it be the same thing as it was before we were born? Or a different kind of nothingness? Because there might be knowledge then. Memory.
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