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.
The several states composing the United States of America are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their general government
Societies can be sunk by the weight of buried ugliness.
Physically, man is but an atom in space, and a pulsation in time. Spiritually, the entire outward universe receives significance from him, and the scope of his existence stretches beyond the stars.
In the end, the aggressors always destroy themselves, making way for others who know how to cooperate and get along. Life is much less a competitive struggle for survival than a triumph of cooperation and creativity.
My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.
Sleeping on a dragon's hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.
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