Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death.
Edna FerberRead
But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and prophyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the unique perspective of an individual who sees beauty and value in the ordinary.
Edna Ferber's quote emphasizes how a person's perception can transform mundane objects into something precious and beautiful. The woman described sees cabbages not merely as vegetables but as gemstones, illustrating that one's outlook on life can wield a powerful influence, making them resilient to life's challenges.
In practice
In a motivational speech about finding beauty in everyday life.
Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death.
It's terrible to realize you don't learn how to live until you're ready to die, and then it's too late.
Living the past is a dull and lonely business; looking back strains the neck muscles, causing you to bump into people not going your way.
I think in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion, dislike, displeasure, resentment, fault-finding, imagination, passionate remonstrance, a sense of injustice-they all make fine fuel.
People only see what they are prepared to see.
If you want to be wisely selfish, care for others
Character cannot be summoned at the moment of crisis if it has been squandered by years of compromise and rationalization. The only testing ground for the heroic is the mundane. The only preparation for that one profound decision which can change a life, or even a nation, is those hundreds of half-conscious, self defining, seemingly insignificant decisions made in private. Habit is the daily battleground of character.
The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.
Those who fail to learn from the brutal stompings visited on them in the past are doomed to be brutally stomped in the future.
Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.