I think it's too easy to recount your unhappy memories when you write about yourself. You bask in your own innocence. You revere your grief. You arrange your angers at their most becoming angles.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that people often focus too much on their pain and grievances when reflecting on their lives.
Margo Jefferson highlights the tendency of individuals to recount their sad memories and experiences, often portraying themselves as innocent victims. This self-narration can lead to a romanticization of grief and anger, where one presents their struggles in a way that is aesthetically pleasing rather than seeking a balanced understanding of their experiences.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the importance of acknowledging both good and bad memories in personal growth.
We talk about how we think, believe, suspect Michael Jackson treats children. We don't talk about how WE treat child stars. Child stars are abused by the culture. And what's more treacherous than when the rewards of child stardom issue from the abuse?_x000D_ Child stars are performers above all else. Whenever their triumps, they are going to make sure we see everyone of their scars. That's the final price of admission.
So much of what blacks and women contend with is centered in how we view, and how the world views, our bodies. Gestures, voices, affect.
Depression is so treacherous - it can be so alluring as well as punishing. After all, it's yours and yours alone - no one else can interfere with it.
I found literary idols in Adrienne Kennedy, Nella Larsen, and Ntozake Shange, writers who'd dared to locate a sanctioned, forbidden space between white vulnerability and black invincibility.
Black Power was really a major challenge to the social privileges and structures of the kind of privilege that I had grown up with. That whole belief... that you will only be able to advance if you are perfectly behaved, if you present yourself as what white people would consider an ideal of whiteness... all of that just began to burst open.
Like dancers with choreography or actors with scripts, jazz singers could take material that was known, even loved, then risk interpreting and revising it. They could conceal even as they revealed themselves. Inflection, timing and tonality were their language, at least as much as words.
Probability is the very guide of life.
I would do what I pleased, and doing what I pleased, I should have my will, and having my will, I should be contented; and when one is contented, there is no more to be desired; and when there is no more to be desired, there is an end of it.
A duel is just two murders who agree to take turns trying to kill each other.
Solitude is a necessary protest to the incursions and the false alarms of society's hysteria, a period of cure and recovery.
The Bible must be the invention either of good men or angels, bad men or devils, or of God. However, it was not written by good men, because good men would not tell lies by saying 'Thus saith the Lord;' it was not written by bad men because they would not write about doing good duty, while condemning sin, and themselves to hell; thus, it must be written by divine inspiration
Private property is one of the best institutions which has ever evolved, to protect us from the bullying of others.
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