My mother once told me I was like water. Water can carve its way even through stone. And when trapped, water makes a new path.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes resilience and adaptability in the face of challenges.
In this quote, Arthur Golden highlights the qualities of water as a metaphor for human strength and adaptability. Just as water is capable of carving paths through solid stone over time, individuals can overcome obstacles and find new ways to thrive when faced with adversity. This reflection on the nature of water symbolizes the importance of persistence and the ability to change course when necessary, illustrating how resilience can lead to growth and transformation.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming life's challenges.
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.
I get those fleeting, beautiful moments of inner peace and stillness - and then the other 23 hours and 45 minutes of the day, I'm a human trying to make it through in this world.
Gentleman-rankers out on the spree, damned from here to Eternity.
I'm terrified of the thought of time passing (or whatever is meant by that phrase) whether I 'do' anything or not. In a way I may believe, deep down, that doing nothing acts as a brake on 'time's - it doesn't of course. It merely adds the torment of having done nothing, when the time comes when it really doesn't matter if you've done anything or not.
When you grow up in abject poverty, you see people exactly the way they are.
Four or five years - nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown up and how unchanged I was.
The Irish tell the story of a man who arrives at the gates of heaven and asks to be let in St. Peter says, “Of course, just show us your scars.” The man says, “I have no scars”. St. Peter says, “What a pity was there nothing worth fighting for”?
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