We knew - but didn't want to know - what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the human tendency to ignore or avoid the knowledge of impending doom.
This quote expresses the paradox of awareness and denial; it suggests that while we may have a sense of the challenges or catastrophes that lie ahead, we often choose to ignore or suppress that realization. The vivid imagery of a falling piano emphasizes the absurdity and inevitability of certain unfortunate events, akin to how people sometimes navigate life with a blend of apprehension and denial about their consequences.
In practice
During a lecture on human psychology, this quote might be used to illustrate how people cope with anxiety about the future.
I have two homes, like someone who leaves their hometown and/or parents and then establishes a life elsewhere. They might say that they're going home when they return to see old friends or parents, but then they go home as well when they go to where they live now. Sarajevo is home, Chicago is home.
I do have a sense of displacement as constant instability β the uninterrupted existence of everything that I love and care about is not guaranteed at all. I wait for catastrophes.
Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.
I loved you because there was no other place for me to go. We were married because we did not know what else to do with each other. You never knew me, nothing about me, what died inside me, what lived invisibly.
All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.
I wanted us to share the sense that the number of wrong moves far exceeds the number of good moves, to share the frightening instability of the correct decision, to bond in being confounded.
Even as I approach the gambling hall, as soon as I hear, two rooms away, the jingle of money poured out on the table, I almost go into convulsions.
Nothing leads to good that is not natural.
If He had not known with certainty that He would be Master over sin and that out of evil would evolve the noblest display of His own glory, He would not have permitted it to enter the world.
Life isn't some vertical or horizontal line -- you have your own interior world, and it's not neat.
It has been hard to muster the resources to support fledgling democracies and to intervene on behalf of the most desperate. The AIDS orphans in Uganda, the refugee fleeing Zimbabwe, the young woman who has been trafficked into the sex trade in Southeast Asia. It has been hard, yet this assistance together with the compassionate work of private charities, people of conscience and people of faith, has shown the soul of our country.
Self is the only oil that makes the chariot-wheels of the hypocrite move in all religious concerns.
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