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.
The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.
No attribute of God is more dreadful to sinners than His holiness.
We should be slower to think that the man at his worst is the real man, and certain that the better we are ourselves the less likely is he to be at his worst in our company. Every time he talks away his own character before us he is signifying contempt for ours.
We did everything adults would do. What went wrong?
...I sense that stepping into the light is also a powerful metaphor for consciousness, for the birth of the knowing mind, for the simple and yet momentous coming of the sense of self into the world of the mental.
The purpose of God is the sovereign cause of all that good that is in man, and of all that external, internal and eternal good that comes to man. Not works past, for men are chosen from everlasting; not works present, for Jacob was loved and chosen before he was born; nor works foreseen, for men were all corrupt in Adam. All a believer's present happiness, and all his future happiness springs from the eternal purpose of God.
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