Arthur Golden Quotes

How can mirrors be real if our eyes aren't real?

Nothing, of course, begins at the time you think it did.

Time's passage through the memory is like molten glass that can be opaque or crystalize at any given moment at will: a thousand days are melted into one conversation, one glance, one hurt, and one hurt can be shattered and sprinkled over a thousand days. It is silent and elusive, refusing to be damned and dripped out day by day; it swirls through the mind while an entire lifetime can ride like foam on the deceptive, transparent waves and get sprayed onto the conciousness at ragged, unexpected intervals.

We don’t choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. Even when we think about the future, we don’t think of our future normally as experiences. We think of our future as anticipated memories.

Life is not what one lived, but what One remembers and how One remembers it in order to recount it

Memory is like fiction; or else it's fiction that's like memory.

The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror.

What is the truth? Is it what you experience? Is it what I experience? Or is there some objective truth in between?

It's all real and it's all illusory: that's Awareness!

What the human eye sees is an illusion of what is real. The black and white image transforms illusions into another reality.

Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.

I think there's more real in the unreal than there is in the real.

I think reality is over-rated

Generally, a lot of the things people think are made up are real, a lot of the things people think are real are made up, a lot of the things people think are spontaneous are cleverly faked, and a lot of the things people think are fake are spontaneous.

'Tell me one last thing,' said Harry. 'Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?' Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry's ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure. 'Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean it is not real?'

Your mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it and thinking about it but without this mind, you call it, the orange would not be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or even mentally noticed, it's actually, that orange, depending on your mind to exist! Don't you see that? By itself it's a no-thing, it's really mental, it's seen only of your mind. In other words it's empty and awake.

Your past is just that, the past, a place within your psyche with no more reality to it then the picture of a castle on a postcard is made from stone.

"Well, it's no use your talking about waking him," said Tweedledum, "when you're only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not real."

Do you know how there are moments when the world moves so slowly you can feel your bones shifting, your mind tumbling? When you think that no matter what happens to you for the rest of your life, you will remember every last detail of that one minute forever?

How paradoxical it is to search reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory.

Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.

Think of my movies as heightening our awareness, not confusing the difference between truth and fiction, but heightening our awareness of how confused we can become about what is real.

There is no seeing. Seeing is only being.

Every human being relies on and is bounded by his knowledge and experience to live. This is what we call “reality”. However, knowledge and experience are ambiguous, thus reality can become illusion. Is it not possible to think that, all human beings are living in their assumptions?

What's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same.