Among writers, if you don't have a therapist, it's like saying you don't keep a journal or use the thesaurus. It's a natural accompaniment.
Amy TanRead
And I think now that fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention. But somehow, when you lose something you love, faith takes over. -Rose
Interpretation
Fate is influenced by our expectations and lack of attention, and losing something dear can lead to a strengthened faith.
This quote suggests that our expectations and attentiveness significantly shape our fate. It also speaks to the human experience of loss, indicating that when we lose something or someone we love, it is often replaced by a deeper sense of faith, guiding us through our difficulties and leading us to new possibilities.
In practice
During a motivational speech about overcoming loss.
Among writers, if you don't have a therapist, it's like saying you don't keep a journal or use the thesaurus. It's a natural accompaniment.
Her education only made her unhappy thinking about it - that no matter how much she changed her life, she could not change the world that surrounded her.
You can't have intentions without consequences. The question is, who pays for the consequences? Saving fish from drowning. Same thing. Whoβs saved? Whoβs not?
I am fascinated by language in daily life: the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.
Even if I had expected it, even if I had known what I was going to do with my life, it would have knocked the wind out of me. When something that violent hits you, you can't help but lose your balance and fall. And after you pick yourself up, you realize you can't trust anybody to save you- not your husband, not your mother, not God. So what can you do to stop yourself from tilting and falling all over again?
And for all those years, we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible accusations afterward at the piano bench. All that remained unchecked, like a betrayal that was now unbreakable. So I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped something so large that failure was inevitable. And even worse, I never asked her what frightened me the most: Why had she given up hope?
With the death of my father, it wasn't just the objects of everyday life that had changed; even the most ordinary street scenes had become irreplaceable mementos of a lost world whose every detail figured in the meaning of the whole.
Life's barely long enough to get good at one thing. So be careful what you get good at.
Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.
They were things for which it was impossible to prepare but which one spent a lifetime looking back at, trying to accept, interpret, comprehend. Things that should never have happened, that seemed out of place and wrong, these were what prevailed, what endured, in the end.
Lives like a drunken sailor on a mast, Ready with every nod to tumble down Into the fatal bowels of the deep.
Our lives will only ever always continue to be a balancing act that has less to do with pain and more to do with beauty.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.