Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can't go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes resilience and adaptability, using water as a metaphor for overcoming challenges.
Margaret Atwood's quote reflects the importance of flexibility and resourcefulness in life. Just as water can change its form and flow around obstacles, we too should embrace adaptability when faced with challenges. It serves as a reminder that resilience can lead to finding alternative paths to success, rather than succumbing to frustration when confronted with barriers.
In practice
Using this quote during a motivational speech about overcoming life's challenges.
If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.
I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.
We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.
I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.
Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.
Silence is an empty space, space is the home of the awakened mind.
The professional respects his craft. He does not consider himself superior to it. He recognizes the contributions of those who have gone before him. He apprentices himself to them.
The breath must be enticed or cajoled, like catching a horse in a field, not by chasing after it, but by standing still with an apple in one’s hand.
Why do alcoholics begin down the same hazardous road day after day? They are in search of that elusive window of well-being that opens when you drink your way out of a hangover and aren't yet drunk all over again. The alcoholic's day consists of trying to keep that window open.
Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another.
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