I'm still learning, you know. At 80, I feel there is a lot I don't know.
Interpretation
Life is a continuous journey of learning, regardless of age.
Lena Horne's quote emphasizes the idea that learning is a lifelong process and that even at the age of 80, one can acknowledge gaps in knowledge. It reflects humility and a recognition that wisdom comes from continual exploration and curiosity about the world.
In practice
In a speech about lifelong education, this quote can be used to inspire older adults.
It's not the load that breaks you down, it's the way you carry it. Carry it by the comfortable handles of gratitude for what's positive and that it is not worse, rather than the uncomfortable edges of bitterness for the negatives and that it is not better.
I'm not alone, I'm free. I no longer have to be a credit, I don't have to be a symbol to anybody; I don't have to be a first to anybody.
I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept. I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked.
My identity is very clear to me now, I am a black woman.
In my early days I was a sepia Hedy Lamarr. Now I'm black and a woman, singing my own way.
It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.
Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action.
If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.
If you haven't cried deeply a number of times, your meditation hasn't really begun.
Talent is culture with insolence.
Instead of taking the reader by the hand and running him down the hill, I want to lead him into a house of many rooms, and leave him alone in each of them.
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