When you believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years. When you do not, you live not just by the day β but by the minute.
Iris ChangRead
The spoken word vanished with the wind. Likewise, the unrecorded life disappears as if it never existed.
Interpretation
Our spoken words and unrecorded lives fade away, leaving little trace behind.
Iris Chang's quote emphasizes the impermanence of spoken communication and lived experiences that are not documented. It highlights the importance of recording our lives and words, suggesting that without preservation, our existence may ultimately be forgotten, much like whispers carried away by the wind.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a speech about the importance of writing and documenting personal stories.
When you believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years. When you do not, you live not just by the day β but by the minute.
Your first duty as a writer is to write to please yourself. And you have no duty towards anyone else.
For some reason, I seem to be bothered whenever I see acts of injustice and assaults on people's civil liberties. I imagine what I write in the future will follow in that vein. Whether it's fiction or non-fiction.
Racism is always there underneath, but usually it is exploited in these times of economic crisis, and it's hard to find out when one slides into another.
Almost all people have this potential for evil, which would be unleashed only under certain dangerous social circumstances.
Environmental degradation, overpopulation, refugees, narcotics, terrorism, world crime movements, and organized crime are worldwide problems that don't stop at a nation's borders.
I know some say, let us have good laws, and no matter for the men that execute them: but let them consider, that though good laws do well, good men do better: for good laws may want good men, and be abolished or evaded [invaded in Franklin's print] by ill men; but good men will never want good laws, nor suffer ill ones.
I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?
On that gray street, with the smell of industrial smokes in the air and the afternoon bleeding away to evening, downtown Derry looked only marginally more charming than a dead hooker in a church pew.
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