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.
We could get more action in the South because the Negroes had a feeling that they were being oppressed. But you take New York, for example: they'd give Negroes little five-cent jobs here and there - and they thought they had something. And the same in Chicago and any of the metropolitan areas.
At any given time, there are a lot of million-dollar luxury charter boats cruising around the Mentawai Islands finding the most incredible waves. And yet the people on shore are suffering. The whole scene is wrong. As a surf community, we have to do something.
Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be, as the egg is to the fowl; we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.
A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be; and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
One has to change one's life. Maybe this is easier for people who have nothing to do than for those who have something to do.
Is the rich world aware of how four billion of the six billion live? If we were aware, we would want to help out, we'd want to get involved.
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