The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have.
Anna QuindlenRead
There is a little boy inside the man who is my brother... Oh, how I hated that little boy. And how I love him too.
Interpretation
The quote expresses the complex emotions of love and resentment towards a sibling's inner child.
In this quote, Anna Quindlen reflects on the duality of feelings we can have towards our family members, particularly siblings. She acknowledges the presence of a vulnerable, childish part in her brother that can evoke both frustration and deep affection, illustrating the intricate bond between siblings that encompasses both joy and pain.
In practice
In a family therapy session to discuss sibling relationships.
The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have.
The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.
I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.
With reference to the younger generation..."If the experience of their exhausted, insomniac, dispirited elders makes them decide they'd prefer not to go straight from the classroom to the cubicle to the coffin, it doesn't mean they're lazy. It means they're sane."
Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them.
I conveniently forgot to remember that people only have two hands, or, as another parent once said of having a third child, it's time for a zone defense instead of man-to-man.
We all lose somebody we care about and want to find some comforting way of dealing with it, something that will give us a little closure, a little peace.
It's great that you can listen and be a shoulder to someone, but what about when someone doesn't need a shoulder? What if they need the arms or something like that? You can't just sit there and put everybody's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can't. You have to do things.
This is not love. It is a crime... You can't look the other way just because you have not experienced domestic violence with your own flesh.
The same chemicals were used in the cooking as were used on the composition of her own being: only those which caused the most violent reaction, contradiction, and teasing, the refusal to answer questions but the love of putting them, and all the strong spices of human relationship which bore a relation to black pepper, paprika, soybean sauce, ketchup and red peppers.
You know your problem, Quentin? You keep expecting people not to be themselves.
Why do people persist in a dissatisfying relationship, unwilling either to work toward solutions or end it and move on? It's because they know changing will lead to the unknown, and most people believe that the unknown will be much more painful than what they're already experiencing.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.