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.
There's no point in being complete on the outside when you're broken in the inside.
All your life you think 60 is ancient, and all of a sudden you find you're 60 and you don't really feel that different. I feel stronger and more engaged. This is the best time of my life.
If we did not have a sense of who we were, how we got here, why we want to achieve something - which, on the face of it, on the logic of it, is probably not worth trying - and prove that logic wrong, then you wouldn't succeed; then you would just evaporate.
I have lost stories and many starts of novels before. Not always as punishment for 'telling,' but more often as a result of something having gone cold and dead because of a hiatus. Telling, you see, is the same as a hiatus. It means you're not doing it.
The Ego is an exquisite instrument. Enjoy it, use it--just don't get lost in it.
Looking up gives light, although at first it makes you dizzy.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.