If something takes too long, something happens to you. You become all and only the thing you want and nothing else, for you have paid too much for it, too much in wanting and too much in waiting and too much in getting.
Interpretation
Desire and prolonged waiting can consume you, changing your identity and priorities.
This quote reflects on how intense longing and the anticipation for something over time can lead to an all-consuming focus on that desire. As one invests significant emotional energy into wanting something, it can overshadow other aspects of life and even transform one's identity and sense of self, suggesting that protracted desire may not always yield a positive outcome.
In practice
During a motivational speech about overcoming obstacles, one can use this quote to discuss the dangers of becoming too fixated on a goal.
...the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you’ve been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.
The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.
And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.
Yet the definition we have made of ourselves is ourselves. To break out of it, we must make a new self. But how can the self make a new self when the selflessness which it is, is the only substance from which the new self can be made?
So little time we live in Time,_x000D_ _x000D_ And we learn all so painfully,_x000D_ _x000D_ That we may spare this hour's term_x000D_ _x000D_ To practice for Eternity.
For what is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding: it is the deepest part of autobiography.
What you would seem to be, be really.
No alibi will save you from accepting the responsibility.
I don't go in for being sorry for people. For one thing it's insulting. One is only sorry for people when they're sorry for themselves. Self-pity is one of the biggest stumbling blocks in the world today.
I used to believe everything my brother told me, because he was older and I figured he knew more about the world. But as it turns out, being a grown-up doesn’t mean you’re fearless. It just means you fear different things.
One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.
The wisdom to quit is all we have left.
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