Lose your temper and you lose the fight.
Interpretation
Maintaining composure is essential for achieving success in conflict.
This quote by Margaret Atwood highlights the importance of emotional control in challenging situations. Losing one's temper often leads to poor decision-making and ineffective communication, ultimately resulting in failure. By staying calm, one can think clearly and respond more effectively, thereby increasing the chances of a favorable outcome in any confrontation.
In practice
During a heated debate, remembering this quote can help you keep your cool and present your arguments effectively.
If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.
I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.
We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.
I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.
Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
If you don’t learn constantly, you don’t grow and you will wither. Too many people wither on the vine. Sure, it gets a little harder as you get older, but new experiences and new challenges keep it fresh.
But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.
The truth can never be wrong, even if no one hears it.
If I have any insight at all to contribute it is this: find out what you are really good at and stick to it.
The best thing I did was choose the right heroes.
Life is divided into three terms - that which was, which is, and which will be. Let us learn from the past to profit by the present, and from the present, to live better in the future.
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