Being a grownup means assuming responsibility for yourself, for your children, and - here's the big curve - for your parents.
Wendy WassersteinRead
The trick. . .is to find the balance between the bright colors of humor and the serious issues of identity, self-loathing, and the possibility for intimacy and love when it seems no longer possible or, sadder yet, no longer necessary.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of balancing humor with serious personal issues in life.
Wendy Wasserstein's quote reflects on the delicate interplay between humor and the serious aspects of our identities, such as self-loathing and the quest for love. It suggests that even in times when intimacy feels impossible or unnecessary, finding joy and humor can help navigate complex emotional landscapes, thus highlighting the importance of balance in life.
In practice
During a speech about mental health, I shared this quote to highlight the importance of laughter in overcoming serious issues.
Being a grownup means assuming responsibility for yourself, for your children, and - here's the big curve - for your parents.
I'm not going to throw my imagination away. I refuse to lie down to expectation. If I can just hold out till I'm thirty, I'll be incredible.
No matter how successful I become as a playwright, my mother would be thrilled to hear me tell her that I'd just lost twenty pounds, gotten married and become a lawyer.
No matter how lonely you get or how many birth announcements you receive, the trick is not to get frightened. There's nothing wrong with being alone.
As soon as he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid. There are maladies we must not seek to cure because they alone protect us from others that are more serious.
And malt does more than Milton can to justify God's ways to man.
Taxing is an easy business. Any projector can contrive new impositions; any bungler can add to the old; but is it altogether wise to have no other bounds to your impositions than the patience of those who are to bear them?
The soul is not the body and it may be in one body or in another, and pass from body to body.
...the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.
In theory we understand people, but in practice we can't put up with them, I thought, deal with them for the most part reluctantly and always treat them from our point of view. We should observe and treat people not from our point of view but from all angles, I thought, associate with them in such a way that we can say we associate with them so to speak in a completely unbiased way, which however isn't possible, since we actually are always biased against everybody.
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