A story is like something you wind out of yourself. Like a spider, it is a web you weave, and you love your story like a child.
Katherine Anne PorterRead
Our being is subject to all the chances of life. There are so many things we are capable of, that we could be or do. The potentialities are so great that we never, any of us, are more than one-fourth fulfilled.
Interpretation
Life presents us with countless opportunities and challenges, yet we often only realize a fraction of our true potential.
Katherine Anne Porter reflects on the nature of human existence, suggesting that life is unpredictable and filled with possibilities. She emphasizes that despite our capabilities, we often only manage to fulfill a small portion of our potential, indicating that there is much more we could achieve if we embraced our possibilities more fully.
In practice
During a motivational speech about personal growth, you could use this quote to illustrate human potential.
A story is like something you wind out of yourself. Like a spider, it is a web you weave, and you love your story like a child.
Writing, in any sense that matters, cannot be taught. It can only be learned by each separate one of us in his own way, by the use of his own powers of imagination and perception, the ability to learn the lessons he has set for himself.
You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being.
They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not.
Miracles are instantaneous, they cannot be summoned, but come of themselves, usually at unlikely moments and to those who least expect them.
Now and again thousands of memories _x000D_ converge, harmonize, _x000D_ arrange themselves around a central idea _x000D_ in a coherent form, _x000D_ and I write a story.
There are moments in life, when the heart is so full of emotion That if by chance it be shaken, or into its depths like a pebble Drops some careless word, it overflows, and its secret, Spilt on the ground like water, can never be gathered together.
I got my Bachelor's degree in nursing and worked nine years - even taught nursing in a college - before I stopped and said to myself, 'This is not who I am. I am not really a nurse inside. I'm a writer.'
I want to be like one of those little fainting goats that get scared and then just fall over. I want to go and go and then drop dead in the middle of something I'm loving to do. And if that doesn't happen, if I wind up sitting in a wheelchair, at least I'll have my high heels on.
Life is a great and wondrous mystery, and the only thing we know that we have for sure is what is right here right now. Don't miss it.
Strange, how such a small realization can affect everyone's life forever. In movies there is always a carefully staged moment - a big crescendo of music, close- ups of the actors' faces, the camera slowly pulling away to let all this sink in for the viewer...but, in real life, most all of the extraordinary things happen with no more loudness than a whisper.
Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.
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