I mean, it's like we all get our raw materials from our families―but it's up to us whether we build bridges or bombs.
Neal ShustermanRead
Either things happen for a reason, or they happen for no reason at all. Either one's life is a thread in a glorious tapestry or humanity is just a hopelessly tangled knot.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote explores the purpose of life and the importance of perspective in interpreting our experiences.
Neal Shusterman's quote presents a dichotomy regarding the nature of events in life: either they are part of a meaningful design, contributing to a larger narrative, or they exist randomly, leading to chaos and confusion. This reflection invites us to consider how we view our struggles and experiences, suggesting that our perspective can significantly shape our understanding of life's events and our place within them.
Themes
LifePurposePerspectiveMeaningChaosTapestry
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech about overcoming challenges.
More from Neal Shusterman
All quotes →Unwinds didn't go out with a bang-they didn't even go out with a whimper. they went out with the silence of a candle flame pinched between two fingers.
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She smiles at them as they go by and continues to play, making it clear that this furnace of a place, full of planes that cannot fly, is more than it seems. It is a womb of redemption for every Unwind, and fora ll those who fought the Heartland War and lost - which was everybody.
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Words don't hurt you." Which is one of the hugest criminal lies perpetrated by adults against children in this world. Because words hurt more than any physical pain.
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Which is worse, Risa often wondered, to have tens of thousands of babies that no one wanted or to silently make then go away before they were even born
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They say you never know who's the real hero and who's the real coward until you're looking death in the face. I've always been afraid of plenty of things, but fear isn't what makes you a coward. It's how depraved your heart becomes when fear gets pumped through it.
Neal ShustermanRead
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All discourse of which others cannot partake is not only an irksome usurpation of the time devoted to pleasure and entertainment, but, what never fails to excite resentment, an insolent assertion of superiority, and a triumph over less enlightened understandings. The pedant is, therefore, not only heard with weariness but malignity; and those who conceive themselves insulted by his knowledge never fail to tell with acrimony how injudiciously it was exerted.
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I want to think and at the same time that's the last thing in the world I want to do.
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Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.
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You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.
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Mathematics can remove no prejudices and soften no obduracy. It has no influence in sweetening the bitter strife of parties, and in the moral world generally its action is perfectly null.
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Most people would never admit it, but they'd been bitching since they were born. As soon as their head popped out into that bright delivery-room light, nothing had been right. Nothing had been as comfortable or felt so good. Just the effort it took to keep your stupid physical body alive, just finding food and cooking it and dishwashing, the keeping warm and bathing and sleeping, the walking and bowel movements and ingrown hairs, it was all getting to be too much work.
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