I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.
Bill BrysonRead
People look with sympathetic eyes only at the blossom and the fruit, and disregard the long period of transition during which the one is ripening into the other.
Interpretation
People often admire success while overlooking the hard work and time it takes to achieve it.
This quote highlights the tendency of people to only appreciate the final outcomes, such as beauty and success, without recognizing the lengthy and often challenging journey that leads to those results. It emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the effort and transformation involved in achieving notable milestones.
In practice
In a motivational speech about persistence and hard work.
I became quietly seized with that nostalgia that overcomes you when you have reached the middle of your life and your father has recently died and it dawns on you that when he went he took some of you with him.
I once cried because I had no shoes to play soccer, but one day, I met a man who had no feet.
Only if I reach 100 years old will I write a very complete autobiography. Not before.
The indignity of it!-_x000D_ _x000D_ With everything blooming above me,_x000D_ _x000D_ Lilies, pale-pink cyclamen, roses,_x000D_ _x000D_ Whole fields lovely and inviolate,-_x000D_ _x000D_ Me down in the fetor of weeds,_x000D_ _x000D_ Crawling on all fours,_x000D_ _x000D_ Alive, in a slippery grave.
Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.
I believe the poor fierce-eyed child had figured out that with a mere fifty dollars in her purse she might somehow reach Broadway or Hollywood - or the foul kitchen of a diner (Help Wanted) in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead.
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