Life is a train that stops at no stations; you either jump abroad or stand on the platform and watch as it passes.
Interpretation
Life requires active participation and decision-making; you can either take action or miss out on opportunities.
This quote by Yasmina Khadra emphasizes the relentless pace of life and the necessity to engage with it actively. It suggests that life is constantly moving forward, much like a train that does not halt for anyone, and encourages individuals to seize opportunities rather than passively observing from the sidelines.
In practice
During a motivational speech emphasizing the importance of taking risks.
If you want your life to be a small part of eternity, to be lucid even in the heart of madness, love... Love with all your strength, love as though it is all you know how to do, love enough to make the gods themselves jealous... for it is in love that all ugliness reveals its beauty.
It seems that the whole world is beginning to decay, and that its putrefaction has chosen to spread outward from here, from the land of the Pashtuns, where desertification proceeds at a steady, implacable crawl even in the consciences and intellects of men.
You can know all there is to know about life and mankind, but what do you really know about yourself?
If I had been born in the circus, my parents would have pushed me on that little high wire at four years old. That's when the body is most limber to learn those acrobatics.
You have to start over. That's what they say. But life is not a board game, and losing a loved one is never really "starting over." More like "continuing without.
People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying school masters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years. Above all -- we were wet.
It's great if a pilot starts off great and if it doesn't start off so great it's not that big a deal: everybody's baby is born ugly. But you want to know, if given the opportunity: Where are we going? What's the story we're trying to tell?
Trying to grow up is hurting. You make mistakes. You try to learn from them, and when you don't, it hurts even more.
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates From it's own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, not falter, nor repent; This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be Good, great and joyous,beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory
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