Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.
Interpretation
Scars symbolize our real experiences and narrate our personal histories.
This quote suggests that scars, both physical and emotional, serve as powerful reminders of our past. They signify that we have experienced pain and challenges, thus grounding us in our own reality and shaping our identities through lived experiences.
In practice
During a motivational speech, one might say this quote to emphasize the importance of embracing one's past.
Yet it is the narrative that is the life of the dream while the events themselves are often interchangeable. The events of the waking world on the other hand are forced upon us and the narrative is the unguessed axis along which they must be strung.
See the hand that nursed the serpent. The fine hasped pipes of her fingerbones. The skin bewenned and speckled. The veins are milkblue and bulby. A thin gold ring set with diamonds. That raised the once child's heart of her to agonies of passion before I was. Here is the anguish of mortality. Hopes wrecked, love sundered. See the mother sorrowing. How everything that I was warned of's come to pass.
What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.
The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.
Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay.
He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.
She thought how strange it would be if she ever said 'Hello' to him. One did not greet oneself each morning.
Why need I volumes, if one word suffice?
Most minds are the slaves of external circumstances, and conform to any hand that undertakes to mould them.
They came from the four corners of the earth, driven by hunger, plague, tumors, and the cold, and stopped here. They couldn’t go any futrther because of the ocean. That’s France, that’s the French people.
We are not angels, we are merely sophisticated apes. Yet we feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, craving transcendence and all the time trying to spread our wings and fly off, and it's really a very odd predicament to be in, if you think about it.
We need not be theologians to see that we have shifted responsibility for making the world interesting from God to the newspaperman.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.