Wendy, Wendy, when you are sleeping in your silly bed you might be flying about with me saying funny things to the stars.
James M. BarrieRead
To die will be an awfully big adventure.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that death can be seen as a significant and profound experience rather than merely an end.
In this quote, James M. Barrie reframes the concept of death, presenting it as an adventurous transition rather than a fearful conclusion. It invites reflection on the perspectives we hold regarding mortality, suggesting that rather than a finality, death can lead to new and unexplored realms, much like an adventure waiting to be experienced. This helps in alleviating the anxiety associated with death, positing it as a natural and transformative part of lifeβs journey.
In practice
In a eulogy, when celebrating a person's life and choices.
Wendy, Wendy, when you are sleeping in your silly bed you might be flying about with me saying funny things to the stars.
His lordship may compel us to be equal upstairs, but there will never be equality in the servants' hall.
The secret of happiness is not in doing what one likes, but in liking what one does.
Never ascribe to an opponent motives meaner than your own.
It was then that Hook bit him. Not the pain of this but its unfairness was what dazed Peter. It made him quite helpless. He could only stare, horrified. Every child is affected thus the first time he is treated unfairly. All he thinks he has a right to when he comes to you to be yours is fairness. After you have been unfair to him he will love you again, but he will never afterwards be quite the same boy. No one ever gets over the first unfairness; no one except Peter.
But the years came and went without bringing the careless boy; and when they met again Wendy was a married woman, and Peter was no more to her than a little dust in the box in which she had kept her toys.
Handle even a single leaf of green in such a way that it manifests the body of the Buddha. This in turn allows the Buddha to manifest through the leaf.
Suddenly Yankel was overcome with a fear of dying, stronger than he felt when his parents passed of natural causes, stronger than when his only brother was killed in the flour mill or when his children died, stronger even than when he was a child and it first occurred to him that he must try to understand what it could mean not to be alive -- to be not in darkness, not in unfeeling -- to be not being, not to be.
I realised that if I wished to write about the dark and not allow for hope, people would recognise it as false - because hope is the nub of what we are.
It is an anxious, sometimes a dangerous thing to be a doll. Dolls cannot choose; they can only be chosen; they cannot 'do'; they can only be done by.
To live for a principle, for the triumph of some reform by which all mankind are to be lifted up to be wedded to an idea may be, after all, the holiest and happiest of marriages.
The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.