...and I confess that, like a child, I cry. Ah, self-pity; I think we are at our most honest and sincere when we feel sorry for ourselves.
Interpretation
Self-pity allows us to confront our vulnerabilities, revealing our true emotions.
In this quote, Iain Banks suggests that experiencing self-pity can lead to a moment of authenticity and honesty. When we allow ourselves to feel sorry for our circumstances, we tap into our most genuine feelings, unmasking the vulnerabilities that often lie hidden beneath our everyday facades.
In practice
In a support group setting where members share personal struggles and experiences.
Writing is like everything else: the more you do it the better you get. Don't try to perfect as you go along, just get to the end of the damn thing. Accept imperfections. Get it finished and then you can go back. If you try to polish every sentence there's a chance you'll never get past the first chapter.
Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change... If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual's circumstances β and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse β then you don't have life after death; you just have death.
People were always sorry. Sorry they had done what they had done, sorry they were doing what they were doing, sorry they were going to do what they were going to do; but they still did whatever it is. The sorrow never stopped them; it just made them feel better. And so the sorrow never stopped.
Oh, they never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misrepresent and willfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending to do exactly the opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.
You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history
But it was pointless, it was stupid; he thought about thoughtless things. If I were a seabird . . . but how could you be a seabird? If you were a seabird your brain would be tiny and stupid and you would love half-rotted fish guts and tweaking the eyes out of little grazing animals; you would know no poetry and you could never appreciate flying as fully as the human on the ground yearning to be you. If you wanted to be a seabird you deserved to be one.
Careless indifference and bodily restlessness in meditation cause negative vibrations.
For the most part, we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs of habits and mental customs.
Each man has his own vocation; his talent is his call. There is one direction in which all space is open to him.
The greatest weapon we have to combat stress is the ability to choose our thoughts.
Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?
I get one hour, really 25 minutes in a sermon on a weekend, to combat all the hours of the week that people are told you are what you have through billboards, commercials, and sitcoms, and so forth.
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