I lived through the garbage. I might as well dine on the caviar.
Interpretation
Embracing life's experiences, both good and bad, can lead to appreciation and enjoyment of better moments.
Beverly Sillsβ quote highlights the resilience and transformation of an individual who has experienced hardship and adversity ('the garbage') and has earned the right to savor the finer things in life ('the caviar'). It suggests that overcoming difficulties enriches one's capacity to value and enjoy the positives that life offers.
In practice
During a motivational talk about overcoming hardship, one might say, 'As Beverly Sills wisely noted, I might as well dine on the caviar.'
I began by listening to my mother's collection of Amelita Galli-Curci and Lily Pons records, and then was taken (at age eight) to hear Pons at a Met performance of Lakme. It was at that moment that I decided to become an opera star. Not just an opera singer, but an opera star!
I was always the first person in the theater all the time. If it was an eight-o'clock curtain, I was here at five-thirty, and it wasn't that I needed to vocalize, because I was all warmed up. I couldn't wait for it to begin.
A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.
There is no shortcut to anyplace worth going.
I had found a kind of serenity, a new maturity. I didn't feel better or stronger than anyone else but it seemed no longer important whether everyone loved me or not - more important now was for me to love them. Feeling that way turns your whole life around; living becomes the act of giving.
Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.
Let it not be death but completeness. Let love melt into memory and pain into songs. Let the flight through the sky end in the folding of the wings over the nest. Let the last touch of your hands be gentle like the flower of the night. Stand still, O Beautiful End, for a moment, and say your last words in silence. I bow to you and hold up my lamp to light you on your way.
These memories sustained him, but not so easily. Too often they reminded him of where he was when he last summoned them. They lay on the far side of a great divide in time, as significant as B.C. and A.D. Before prison, before the war, before the sight of a corpse became a banality.
At some point in life, the world's beauty becomes enough.
And O there are days in this life, worth life and worth death.
Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain You are young and life is long, and there is time to kill today And then one day you find, ten years has got behind you No one told you where to run, you missed the starting gun.
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