Adulthood isn't an award they'll give you for being a good child. You can waste years, trying to get someone to give that respect to you, as though it were a sort of promotion or raise in pay. If only you do enough, if only you are good enough. No. You have to just take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I'm sorry you feel like that and walk away. But that's hard
Interpretation
Adulthood is not a reward; it requires self-acceptance and self-assertion.
This quote emphasizes that entering adulthood is not a recognition of one's childhood behavior or character, but rather an assertion of one's own status and identity. The journey to adulthood involves acknowledging that respect and validation must come from within, rather than waiting for it to be granted by others. It highlights the importance of self-empowerment and the difficulty of moving on from the need for external approval.
In practice
When discussing personal growth at a seminar.
Any communitys arm of force - military, police, security - needs people in it who can do necessary evil, and yet not be made evil by it. To do only the necessary and no more. To constantly question the assumptions, to stop the slide into atrocity.
Never underestimate the human capacity for wishful thinking and willful blindness,' said Miles. Such as a whole society of people who became so wrapped up in avoiding death, they forgot to be alive?
Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I'd always thought kindness a trivial virtue, therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at ease before his own hearth.
It was never what I wanted to buy that held my heart's hope. It was what I wanted to be.
His outflung hands traced over the threads of his rug, passed loop by loop through some patient woman's hands. Or maybe she hadn't been patient. Maybe she'd been tired, or irritated, or distracted, or hungry, or angry. Maybe she had been dying. But her hands had kept moving, all the same.
The real unforgivable acts are committed by calm men in beautiful green silk rooms, who deal death wholesale, by the shipload, without lust, without anger, or desire, or any redeeming emotion to excuse them but cold fear of some pretended future. But the crimes they hope to prevent in that future are imaginary. The ones they commit in the present - they are real.
There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.
What a lovely surprise to finally discover how unlonely being alone can be.
The traveling salesmen fed me pills that made the lining of my veins feel scraped out, my jaw ached... I knew every raindrop by its name, I sensed everything before it happened. Like I knew a certain oldsmobile would stop even before it slowed, and by the sweet voices of the family inside, I knew we'd have an accident in the rain. I didn't care. They said they'd take me all the way.
To some extent, 'The Wall' is asking the question, 'Do you want a voice? And if you do, you better bloody well go out and get it because it's not going to be handed to you on a plate.'
Well, maybe it was just that I wasn't going to like anybody because I had to work and I had to explain to my teachers why I wasn't keeping up. I'd fall asleep and things in class and they'd lecture me about the reality of their classroom. I said, 'You want to see my reality?' I opened up my backpack to where you usually keep your pencils. That's where I kept my bills... electric bills, rent... That was my reality.
From the age of 15 to 50, I'd hardly stepped out of a kitchen. I just wanted to live a little, to spend time with my wife and children. The first time I saw snow was when I was 50, because I'd never had the time before.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.