There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.
Dorothy ParkerRead
This living, this living, this living Was never a project of mine.
Interpretation
Life is unpredictable and often not what we plan for.
Dorothy Parker's quote reflects on the often unplanned and chaotic nature of life. It suggests that despite our aspirations and projects, the essence of living may not align with what we consciously set out to achieve, highlighting the spontaneity of human experience and existence.
In practice
In a speech about embracing life's unexpected turns, I illustrated with Parker's quote.
There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.
My land is bare of chattering folk; / the clouds are low along the ridges, / and sweet's the air with curly smoke / from all my burning bridges.
Prince or commoner, tenor or bass, Painter or plumber or never-do-well, Do me a favor and shut your face - Poets alone should kiss and tell.
They say of me, and so they should, It's doubtful if I come to good. I see acquaintances and friends Accumulating dividends And making enviable names In science, art and parlor games. But I, despite expert advice, Keep doing things I think are nice, And though to good I never come Inseparable my nose and thumb.
It is that word 'hunny,' my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.
I canβt write five words but that I change seven.
What is there unreasonable in admitting the intervention of a supernatural power in the most ordinary circumstances of life?
If by the liberty of the press were understood merely the liberty of discussing the propriety of public measures and political opinions, let us have as much of it as you please: But if it means the liberty of affronting, calumniating and defaming one another, I, for my part, own myself willing to part with my share of it, whenever our legislators shall please so to alter the law and shall chearfully consent to exchange my liberty of abusing others for the privilege of not being abused myself.
The proximity of an army causes prices to go up; and high prices cause people's substance to be drained away. When their substance is drained away, they will be afflicted by heavy exactions. With this loss of substance and exhaustion of strength, the homes of the people will be stripped bare, and their incomes dissipated.
The highest manifestation of life consists in this: that a being governs its own actions. A thing which is always subject to the direction of another is somewhat of a dead thing.
I have neither permitted, nor shall I permit, the things which have been settled by the holy fathers to be violated by any innovation.
We are like plants which have the one choice of being in or out of the light.
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