Eventually we all have to accept full and total responsibility for our actions, everything we have done, and have not done.
Interpretation
We must acknowledge and take responsibility for our choices and inactions in life.
This quote emphasizes the importance of personal accountability. Hubert Selby, Jr. suggests that as individuals, we must confront the consequences of our actions, both the things we have done and the opportunities we have failed to seize. Accepting responsibility is crucial to personal growth and understanding the impact of our decisions on ourselves and others.
In practice
In a self-improvement seminar, one might use this quote to encourage participants to take charge of their lives.
Being an artist doesnβt take much, just everything you got. Which means, of course, that as the process is giving you life, it is also bringing you closer to death. But itβs no big deal. They are one in the same and cannot be avoided or denied. So when I totally embrace this process, this life/death, and abandon myself to it, I transcend all this meaningless gibberish and hang out with the gods. It seems to me that that is worth the price of admission.
Obviously, I believe that to pursue the American Dream is not only futile but self-destructive because ultimately it destroys everything and everyone involved with it. By definition it must, because it nurtures everything except those things that are important: integrity, ethics, truth, our very heart and soul. Why? The reason is simple: because Life/life is giving, not getting.
There's a sorrow and pain in everyone's life, but every now and then there's a ray of light that melts the loneliness in your heart and brings comfort like hot soup and a soft bed.
Sometimes we have the absolute certainty there's something inside us that's so hideous and monstrous that if we ever search it out we won't be able to stand looking at it. But it's when we're willing to come face to face with that demon that we face the angel.
The mistake that is made always runs the other way. Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed that they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more. This assumption is a folly.
Our chronic discomfort with ambiguity - which, ironically, is critical to both our creativity and the richness of our lives - leads us to lock down safe, comfortable, familiar interpretations, even if they are only partial representations of or fully disconnected from reality.
I'm always trying to tackle subjects that tax me and make me think. That's the key to staying young at heart. The brain has to be exercised the same as the rest of the body.
Knowledge and human power are synonymous.
Let us take things as we find them: let us not attempt to distort them into what they are not... We cannot make facts. All our wishing cannot change them. We must use them.
My thinking is first and last and always for the sake of my doing, and I can only do one thing at a time.
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