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.
We have contradictory expectations of police: We want to be perfectly safe and perfectly free. We want total security and total privacy. We want the bad guys stopped and the good guys unmolested. That's great for the consumer; try providing it.
In any dispute, each side thinks it's in the right and the other side is demons.
The past is already gone, the future is not yet here. There's only one moment for you to live, and that is the present moment
The honest ratepayer and his healthy family have no doubt often mocked at the dome-like forehead of the philosopher, and laughed over the strange perspective of the landscape that lies beneath him. If they really knew who he was, they would tremble. For Chuang Tsǔ spent his life in preaching the great creed of Inaction, and in pointing out the uselessness of all things.
Doesn't expecting the unexpected make the unexpected expected?
I have a dreadful fear that the more you try to prevent revealing the self the more you do.
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