01c. 1956 ADAnd then I became aware of all the magnificent silk wrapped around my body, and had the feeling I might drown in beauty. At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.Arthur Golden / quote ↗
02c. 1956 ADAt that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.Arthur Golden / quote ↗
03c. 1956 ADA memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.Arthur Golden / quote ↗
04c. 1956 ADWhen a man takes a mistress, he doesn't turn around and divorce his wife.Arthur Golden / quote ↗
05c. 1956 ADEven now that he is gone I have him still, in the richness of my memories. I've lived my life again just telling it to you.Arthur Golden / quote ↗
06c. 1956 ADHere's the thing: this eel spends its entire life trying to find a home, and what do you think women have inside them? Caves, where the eels like to live...when they find a cave they like, the wriggle around inside it for a while to be sure that...well, to be sure it's a nice cave, I suppose. And when they've made up their minds that it's comfortable, they mark the cave as their territory...by spitting.Arthur Golden / quote ↗
07c. 1956 ADFinally the homeless eel marked its territory, I suppose, and the Doctor lay heavily upon me, moist with sweat.Arthur Golden / quote ↗
08c. 1956 ADOh I'm sure you're right," Auntie said. "Probably she's just as you say. But she looks to me like a very clever girl, and adaptable; you can see that from the shape of her ears.Arthur Golden / quote ↗
09c. 1956 ADWhen we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.Arthur Golden / quote ↗
10c. 1956 ADWe human beings are only a part of something very much larger. When we walk along, we may crush a beetle or simply cause a change in the air so that a fly ends up where it might never have gone otherwise. And if we think of the same example but with ourselves in the role of the insect, and the larger universe in the role we've just played, it's perfectly clear that we're affected every day by forces over which we have no more control than the poor beetle has over our gigantic foot as it descends upon it. What are we to do? We must use whatever methods we can to understand the movement of the universe around us and time our actions so that we are not fighting the currents, but moving with them.Arthur Golden / quote ↗
11c. 1956 ADIf he couldn't forgive you for what you'd done, it was clear to me he was never truly your destiny.Arthur Golden / quote ↗
12c. 1956 ADBut, Mameha-san, I don’t want kindness!”“Don’t you? I thought we all wanted kindness. Perhaps what you mean is that you want something more than kindness. And that is something you’re in no position to ask.Arthur Golden / quote ↗
13c. 1956 ADthat droplet of moisture that had slipped from me like a tear seemed almost to tell the story of my life. It fell through empty space, with no control whatsoever over its destiny; rolled along a path of silk; and somehow came to rest there on the teeth of that dragon. I thought of the petals I’d thrown into the Kamo River shallows outside Mr. Arashino’s workshop, imagining they might find their way to the Chairman. It seemed to me that, somehow, perhaps they had.Arthur Golden / quote ↗
14c. 1956 ADI knew even then that she was right. 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. Nobu's touch had made a deeper impression on me than most. No one could tell me whether he would be my ultimate destiny, but I had always sensed the en between us. Somewhere in the landscape of my life Nobu would always be present. But could it really be that of all the lessons I'd learned, the hardest one lay just ahead of me? Would I really have to take each of my hopes and put them away where no one would ever see them again, where not even I would ever see them?Arthur Golden / quote ↗
15c. 1956 ADI'm not sure this will make sense to you but I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction so that I no longer faced backward toward the past but forward toward the future. And now the question confronting me was this: What would the future beArthur Golden / quote ↗
16c. 1956 ADIf we rub a fabric too often, it will quickly grow threadbare; and Nobu’s words had rasped against me so much, I could no longer maintain that finely lacquered surface Mameha had always counseled me to hide behind.Arthur Golden / quote ↗
17c. 1956 ADGrief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.Arthur Golden / quote ↗
18c. 1956 ADI stumbled out into the courtyard to try to flee my misery, but of course we can never flee the misery that is within us.Arthur Golden / quote ↗
19c. 1956 ADI went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulling me down toward them.Arthur Golden / quote ↗
20c. 1956 ADSadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier.Arthur Golden / quote ↗
21c. 1956 ADMy tears simply broke through the fragile wallthat had held them, and with a terrible feeling of shame, I laid my head upon the table and let them drain out of me.Arthur Golden / quote ↗
22c. 1956 ADYet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.Arthur Golden / quote ↗
23c. 1956 ADCouldn't the wrong sort of living turn anyone mean? I remembered very well that one day back in Yoroido, a boy pushed me into a thorn bush near the pond. By the time I clawed my way out I was mad enough to bite through wood. If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.Arthur Golden / quote ↗
24c. 1956 ADI never seek to defeat the man I am fighting, " he explained. "I seek to defeat his confidence. A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course to victory. Two men are equals - true equals - only when they both have equal confidence.Arthur Golden / quote ↗
