Hopes were wallflowers. Hopes hugged the perimeter of a dance floor in your brain, tugging at their party lace, all perfume and hems and doomed expectation. They fanned their dance cards, these guests that pressed against the walls of your heart.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the fragility and often overlooked nature of hopes and dreams within one's mind and emotions.
Karen Russell's quote poetically illustrates the concept of hopes as delicate, timid entities that linger at the edges of our consciousness and emotions. By describing hopes as 'wallflowers' at a dance, she conveys how they often go unnoticed and unrecognized, despite their longing to actively engage in the dance of life. It suggests that hopes are filled with beauty and aspiration yet seem overshadowed by the weight of expectation and the fear of disappointment.
In practice
This quote could be shared during a motivational talk about pursuing one's dreams despite challenges.
No, I don’t have to tell a soul about this, I promised myself. When you are a kid, you don’t know yet that a secret, like an animal, can evolve. Like an animal, a secret can develop a self-preserving intelligence. Shaglike, mute and thick, a knowledge with a fur: your secret.
If you give up your freedom for safety, you don't deserve either one
Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference.
All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.
A functioning police state needs no police.
Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.
All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it.
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