Arthur Golden
Time your actions so you're not fighting against the currents but moving with them.Collection: Moving
It's your duty to use what influence you have, unless you want to drift through life like a fish belly-up on the stream" "I wish I could believe that life really is something more than a stream that carries us along, belly-up" "Alright, if it's a stream, you're still free to be in this part of it or that part, aren't you? The water will divide again and again. If you bump, and tussle, and fight, and make use of whatever advantages you might have-" "Oh, that's fine, I'm sure, when you have advantages." "You'd find them everywhere, if you ever bothered to look!Collection: Believe
Seeing him again after so long awakened something inside me. I was surprised to find myself feeling sad rather than joyful, as I would have imagined.Collection: Long
Memoirs give the knowledge about the author and his environment. They are different from biography. Memoirs do not get ahead, and the man who writes a biography looks at his future like at a very simple thing.Collection: Writing
And when I raised myself to look at the man who'd spoken, I had a feeling of leaving my misery behind me there on the stone wall.Collection: Wall
The corridor couldn't have smelled more strongly of fish guts if we had actually been inside a fish.Collection: Fishes
I could no more have stopped myself from feeling that sadness than you could stop yourself from smelling an apple that has been cut open on the table before you.Collection: Sadness
We human beings have a remarkable way of growing accustomed to things.Collection: Growing
A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.Collection: Records
I was thanking him for...well, for something I'm not sure I can explain even now. For showing me that something besides cruelty could be found in the world, I suppose.Collection: Thanking Him
I began to feel that all the people I'd ever known who had died or left me had not in fact gone away, but continued to live on inside me just as this man's wife lived on inside him.Collection: Men
Those of us with water in our personalities don't pick where we'll flow to. All we can do is flow where the landscape of our lives carries usCollection: Water
Every man has his destiny. But who needs to go to a fortune-teller to find it? Do I go to a chef to find out if I'm hungry?Collection: Destiny
How many times already had I encountered the painful lesson that although we may wish for the barb to be pulled from our flesh, it leaves a welt that doesn't heal?Collection: Wish
Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.Collection: Flower
All at once I felt so vain, like a girl posturing for the crowds as she walks along, only to discover the street is empty.Collection: Girl