Have you ever tried to get to your feet with a sprained dignity?
Interpretation
The quote humorously highlights the struggle of maintaining oneβs dignity after a setback.
Madeleine L'Engle's quote captures the humorous and ironic challenge of trying to uphold one's sense of pride or dignity after experiencing a humiliating or painful situation. The phrase 'sprained dignity' suggests that just as we physically recover from an injury, we also have to find a way to regain our emotional and social standing, often through resilience, humor, and self-acceptance.
In practice
This quote could be used during a toast at a gathering to emphasize the importance of humility after failure.
Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous.
George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble--times when I have seen people tempted to deny God--when he says, "The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his.
If you don't recount your family history, it will be lost. Honor your own stories and tell them too. The tales may not seem very important, but they are what binds families and makes each of us who we are.
I never want to lose the story-loving child within me, or the adolescent, or the young woman, or the middle-aged one, because all together they help me to be fully alive on this journey, and show me that I must be willing to go where it takes me, even through the valley of the shadow.
The minute we begin to think we have all the answers, we forget the questions.
When we believe in the impossible, it becomes possible, and we can do all kinds of extraordinary things.
Now, some people do this for shock value. Shock is just another uptown word for surprise. Granted it has a different quality to it, but a joke is about surprising someone. I'm a great believer in context. You can joke about anything. I do like finding out where the line is drawn, deliberately crossing it and bringing some of them with me across the line, and having them be happy that I did.
I'll try if I know all the things I used to know. Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is - oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate!
Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time... I think I've forgotten this before.
Jokes of the proper kind, properly told, can do more to enlighten questions of politics, philosophy, and literature than any number of dull arguments.
every idiot who goes about with a 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.
Well, Ben Rogers, if I was as ignorant as you I wouldn't let on.
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