In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.
Lauren GroffRead
Sometimes immense things, like war and death and aging, are best seen from the corner of the eye and written of only obliquely, with tremendous lightness.
Interpretation
Life's weighty matters are sometimes best approached with subtlety and lightness.
This quote suggests that significant and heavy topics such as war, death, and aging can be overwhelming if confronted directly. Instead, they may be better understood and articulated through a more nuanced and indirect perspective, allowing for a lighter touch that can reveal deeper insights without the burden of heaviness.
In practice
In a discussion on coping with loss, this quote serves to remind us to navigate our feelings with grace.
In the end, fiction is the craft of telling truth through lies.
And she, the new mother of a daughter, felt a fierceness come over her that seized at her heart, that made her feel as if her bones were turned to steel, as if she could turn herself into a weapon to keep this daughter of hers from having to be hurt by the world outside the ring of her arms.
I seem to long for community and mistrust it in equal measure, and so I spend most of my days carefully constructing various communities in stories and seeing if they fly.
There is no governor anywhere. You are all absolutely free. There is no restraint that cannot be escaped. If anybody could go into dhyana at will, nobody could be controlled - by fear of prison, by fear of whips or electroshock, by fear of death, even. All existing society is based on keeping those fears alive, to control the masses. Ten people who know would be more dangerous than a million armed anarchists.
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.
But the saddest difference between them was that Zazetsky, as Luria said, 'fought to regain his lost faculties with the indomitable tenacity of the damned,' whereas Dr P. was not fighting, did not know what was lost. But who was more tragic, or who was more damned -- the man who knew it, or the man who did not?
Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good.
The law of nations is naturally founded on this principle, that different nations ought in time of peace to do one another all the good they can, and in time of war as little injury as possible, without prejudicing their real interests.
The question is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what He intended us to be when He made us.
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