What's lucky about my career in general is that I stumbled into what every writer most wants. Not repeating myself and doing strange things has become my trademark.
Jonathan LethemRead
Listen to me. I’m shy. I’m not stupid. I can’t meet people’s eyes. I don’t know if you understand what that’s like. There’s a whole world going on around me, I’m aware of that. It’s not because I don’t want to look at you, Lucinda. It’s that I don’t want to be seen.
Interpretation
This quote expresses the struggle of a shy person who feels overwhelmed by social interactions.
In this quote, the speaker shares their internal experience of shyness, highlighting the difference between a desire to connect and the fear of being vulnerable. It emphasizes that shyness is not a lack of intelligence or desire to engage; rather, it is an emotional barrier that complicates interactions with others, signaling a deeper introspection and self-awareness amidst the chaos of social life.
In practice
In a speech about overcoming personal barriers, one might use this quote to illustrate the complexity of shyness.
What's lucky about my career in general is that I stumbled into what every writer most wants. Not repeating myself and doing strange things has become my trademark.
I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.
Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.
Apparently Brooklyn needn't always push itself to be something else, something conscious and anxious, something pointed toward Manhattan.... Brooklyn might sometimes also be pleased, as here on Flatbush, to be its grubby, enduring self.
I'd have been a filmmaker or a cartoonist or something else which extended from the visual arts into the making of narratives if I hadn't been able to shift into fiction.
It was only as I wrote about it that I began to find paths of access to feelings that were intolerable to me then.
Do you know what people want more than anything? They want to be missed. They want to be missed the day they don't show up. They want to be missed when they're gone.
Each betrayal begins with trust.
There's one sad truth in life I've found While journeying east and west - The only folks we really wound Are those we love the best. We flatter those we scarcely know, We please the fleeting guest, And deal full many a thoughtless blow To those who love us best.
It may be very well to do this and that for good fellowship; but it will never do to lose the friendship of God in order to keep on good terms with men.
I fervently believe that people shouldn't stay in bad relationships just because of some artificial rom-com notion of true love being "forever." In fact, I think that the pressure of conforming to that framework ruins-literally RUINS-a lot of people's lives.
The spirit of the marriage left the bedroom and took to living in the parlor.
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