I’m not sentimental about anything. Life flows by, and you flow with it or you don’t. Move on and move out.
Interpretation
Life is constantly changing, and one must adapt rather than cling to the past.
Gore Vidal's quote emphasizes the transient nature of life, suggesting that attachment to the past is futile. Instead, it encourages individuals to embrace change and flow with life's currents, advocating for resilience and the necessity of moving forward, both physically and emotionally.
In practice
During a motivational talk about overcoming adversity.
We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.
Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.
Spaces devoted to Hannibal Lecter’s earliest years differ from the other archives in being incomplete. Some are static scenes, fragmentary, like painted attic shards held together by blank plaster. Other rooms hold sound and motion, great snakes wrestling and heaving in the dark and lit in flashes. Pleas and screaming fill some places on the grounds where Hannibal himself cannot go. But the corridors do not echo screaming, and there is music if you like.
Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough?
One of the guiding beliefs of our consuming age is that we are all free and independent individuals. That we can choose to do pretty much what we want, and if we can't, then it's bad. But at the same time, co-existing alongside this, there is a completely different, parallel universe where we all seem meekly to do what those in power tell us to do.
He is unworthy of the name of man who is ignorant of the fact that the diagonal of a square is incommensurable with its side.
No human being is constituted to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; and even the best of men must be content with fragments, with partial glimpses, never the full fruition.
We adults, our policies, our ways of governance, are responsible for poverty, not the children.
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