Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.
Norman MailerRead
So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the futility of relying on those who lack insight to guide others.
Norman Mailerβs quote speaks to the absurdity of miscommunication and misguided leadership. It suggests that when individuals who themselves lack understanding or awareness attempt to offer guidance, the result is chaos and confusion, akin to the blind leading the blind. The imagery of the deaf shouting warnings illustrates how ineffective communication can lead to a complete breakdown in dialogue, leading ultimately to a loss of voices and vital messages.
In practice
During a discussion on leadership failures, one could use this quote to emphasize the need for informed guidance.
Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state. I do not know who I am. Nor what I was. I cannot hear a sound. Pain is near that will be like no pain felt before.
I no longer gave a sick dog's drop for the wisdom, the reliability and the authority of the public's literary mind, those creeps and old ladies of vested reviewing.
There's nothing glorious about being a professional. . . . Professionalism probably comes down to being able to work on a bad day.
The natural role of twentieth-century man is anxiety.
Over-certified adjectives are the mark of most best-seller writing
At bottom, I mean profoundly at bottom, the FBI has nothing to do with Communism, it has nothing to do with catching criminals, it has nothing to do with the Mafia, the syndicate, it has nothing to do with trust-busting, it has nothing to do with interstate commerce, it has nothing to do with anything but serving as a church for the mediocre. A high church for the true mediocre.
My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination.
It is altogether unlawful to kill oneself... Wherefore suicide is contrary to the inclination of nature, and to charity whereby every man should love himself... Life is God's gift to man, and is subject to His power, Who kills and makes to live. Hence whoever takes his own life, sins against God... for it belongs to God alone to pronounce sentence of death and life.
It is still open for me, as well as you, to regulate my behavior, by my experience of past events.
Pure libertarianism believes that people will be generous and help each other. Well, they won't. I wish it were so, and I live that way. I help panhandlers, but other people are, 'Oh look at that - why doesn't he get a job?' While I believe in all that freedom, I also believe that no one should suffer needlessly.
some mornings... I sit at the kitchen table shaking salt into the hairs on my arm, and a feeling shoves up in me: it's finished. Everything went past without me.
Divinity is not something supernatural that ever and again invades the natural order in a crashing miracle. Divinity is not in some remote heaven, seated on a throne. Divinity is love. . . . Wherever goodness, beauty, truth, love, are-there is the divine.
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