We wait till now? Now, when we're old men, we get to be brave?
Ernest GainesRead
Sometimes you got to hurt something to help something. Sometimes you have to plow under one thing in order for something else to grow.
Interpretation
Sometimes sacrifice or difficult choices are necessary for growth and improvement.
In this quote, Ernest Gaines emphasizes the idea that making tough decisions or enduring temporary pain is often necessary to facilitate positive change or growth in life. Just as agriculture requires the soil to be plowed and sometimes even sacrificed to yield a fruitful harvest, so too do our lives require us to let go of certain things in order to nurture new opportunities and developments.
In practice
This quote can be used in a personal development workshop to highlight the importance of letting go of the past.
We wait till now? Now, when we're old men, we get to be brave?
I was raised by a lady that was crippled all her life but she did everything for me and she raised me. She washed our clothes, cooked our food, she did everything for us. I don't think I ever heard her complain a day in her life. She taught me responsibility towards my brother and sisters and the community.
...my heart may have been in it but my soul was not.
Everything's been said, but it needs saying again.
Question everything. Every stripe, every star, every word spoken. Everything.
The Six Golden Rules of Writing: Read, read, read, and write, write, write.
Everything has seasons, and we have to be able to recognize when something's time has passed and be able to move into the next season. Everything that is alive requires pruning as well, which is a great metaphor for endings.
You think OWS is radical? You think 350.org was radical for helping organize mass civil disobedience in D.C. in August against the Keystone Pipeline? We're not radical. Radicals work for oil companies. The CEO of Exxon gets up every morning and goes to work changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere. No one has ever done anything as radical as that, not in all of human history.
The world is no longer against us.
I feel so guilty about the state of young people today. And I say that because our generation fought for everything. We fought to sit down at a counter, to sit on a bus. They were left with nothing to fight for.
After spending three or four years interacting with the Bush administration, I realized they were not taking any actions to deal with climate change. So, I decided to give one talk, and then it snowballed into another talk and eventually to even protesting and getting arrested.
Again and again in history some people wake up. They have no ground in the crowd and move to broader deeper laws. They carry strange customs with them and demand room for bold and audacious action. The future speaks ruthlessly through them. They change the world.
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