I don't think you ever understand your life - not till it's finished and probably not then either. The more I live the less I seem to understand.
Interpretation
Understanding life is a complex journey that often eludes us until it ends.
This quote reflects the idea that life is intricate and challenging to comprehend while we are living it, and often, even in hindsight, we may continue to lack complete understanding. The speaker conveys a sense of confusion and mystery surrounding life, suggesting that as one experiences more of it, clarity might diminish rather than improve.
In practice
During a philosophical discussion about the meaning of life.
If I hadn't read all of Jane Austen and DH Lawrence, Tolstoy and Proust, as well as the more fun stuff, I wouldn't know how to break bad news, how to sympathise, how to be a friend or a lover, because I wouldn't have any idea what was going on in anybody else's mind.
A romantic is someone who believes that something is valuable even if it doesn't last. And a non-romantic is someone who says that if something doesn't endure, or can't be logically proved and pinned down, it's worthless.
From an early age she had developed the art of being alone and generally preferred her own company to anyone else’s. She read books at enormous speed and judged them entirely on her ability to remove her from her material surroundings. In almost all the unhappiest days of her life she had been able to escape from her own inner world by living temporarily in someone else’s, and on the two or three occasions that she had been too upset to concentrate she had been desolate.
People never explain to you exactly what they think and feel and how their thoughts and feelings work, do they? They don't have time. Or the right words. But that's what books do. It's as though your daily life is a film in the cinema. It can be fun, looking at those pictures. But if you want to know what lies behind the flat screen you have to read a book. That explains it all.
Depression - that limp word for the storm of black panic and half-demented malfunction - had over the years worked itself out in Charlotte's life in a curious pattern. Its onset was often imperceptible: like an assiduous housekeeper locking up a rambling mansion, it noiselessly went about and turned off, one by one, the mind's thousand small accesses to pleasure.
Your reputation is what you're perceived to be, Your character is what you really are
What is not brought to consciousness, comes to us as fate.
If thou suffer injustice, console thyself; the true unhappiness is in doing it.
Real isn't how you are made. It's a thing that happens to you. Sometimes it hurts, but when you are Real you don't mind being hurt. It doesn't happen all at once. You become. Once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand. Once you are Real you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always.
Things happen to us in unpredictable ways, but the effect that that has on the kind of people who we become actually is not only open to chance - we can influence it in pretty profound ways.
He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this heretical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish?
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