There is such a thing as the poetry of a mistake, and when you say, "Mistakes were made," you deprive an action of its poetry, and you sound like a weasel.
Interpretation
Acknowledging mistakes allows for growth and understanding, while deflecting blame diminishes their significance.
This quote by Charles Baxter emphasizes the importance of recognizing and owning our mistakes, suggesting that mistakes have a certain beauty or depth that can be appreciated. By saying 'Mistakes were made,' rather than taking personal responsibility, one loses the opportunity to learn from the experience and instead appears evasive or insincere.
In practice
During a team meeting to discuss project outcomes, one might quote this to highlight the importance of owning up to missteps.
Say what you want about it, Hell is story-friendly... The mechanisms of hell are nicely attuned to the mechanisms of narrative. Not so the pleasures of Paradise. Paradise is not a story. It's about what happens when the stories are over.
A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.
The problem with love and God, the two of them, is how to say anything about them that doesn’t annihilate them instantly with the wrong words, with untruth. . . . In this sense, love and God are equivalents. We feel both, but because we cannot speak clearly about them, we end up–wordless, inarticulate—by denying their existence altogether, and, pfffffft, they die.
When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story.
You know, there's something heartsick about parties like this. Look at us. We're all pretending to be smart, as if intelligence were the cure for our anguish.
Knowledge is essential to conquest; only according to our ignorance are we helpless. Thought creates character. Character can dominate conditions. Will creates circumstances and environment.
God cannot forgive a sinner who does not acknowledge his sin.
Self-acceptance is my refusal to be in an adversarial relationship to myself.
I compare it with a lie, which like to a snowball, the longer it is rolled the greater it becomes.
To have something to say is a question of sleepless nights and worry and endless ratiocination of subject - of endless trying to dig out the essential truth, the essential justice. As a first premise you have to develop a conscience and if on top of that you have talent so much the better. But if you have talent without the conscience, you are just one of many thousands of journalists.
If you meditate, meditation is so beautiful, who bothers about the result? And if you bother about the result, meditation is not possible. This result oriented mind is the only barrier, the only block. There are not many blocks, the only block is that of the result oriented mind: never here-now, always somewhere else thinking of the result; while making love, thinking about the result.
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