At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.
Interpretation
Beauty can evoke deep feelings of sadness and longing.
This quote reflects on the complex nature of beauty, suggesting that it can inspire not only admiration but also a profound sense of melancholy. This juxtaposition highlights how beauty often contains an element of transience and loss, invoking feelings that are both uplifting and sorrowful.
In practice
In a poetry reading, this quote could be used to discuss the emotional complexities of artistic expressions.
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.
there i was in late middle age, cut loose in a thoroughly looted, bankrupt nation whose assets had been sold off to foreigners, a nation swamped by unchecked plagues and superstition and illiteracy and hypnotic tv, with virtually no health services for the poor. where to go? what to do?
If you seek authenticity for authenticity's sake you are no longer authentic.
Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life.
when she thought it over afterwards it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural
A belief is purely an individual matter, and you cannot and must not organize it. If you do, it becomes dead, crystallized; it becomes a creed, a sect, a religion, to be imposed on others.
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