some mornings... I sit at the kitchen table shaking salt into the hairs on my arm, and a feeling shoves up in me: it's finished. Everything went past without me.
Jennifer EganRead
In a way, I'm always trying to do something I'm not qualified to do. So I feel that lack of qualification. And I'm scared. And I have a tendency to think things may not/probably won't work out. That's my basic mindset.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the struggle of feeling unqualified in various pursuits and the accompanying fear of failure.
Jennifer Egan expresses a common experience of undertaking challenges where one feels they lack the necessary qualifications. This mindset of self-doubt and fear is juxtaposed with the willingness to pursue these challenges, highlighting a universal human experience of vulnerability when stepping outside one's comfort zone.
In practice
In a motivational speech about embracing challenges despite fear.
some mornings... I sit at the kitchen table shaking salt into the hairs on my arm, and a feeling shoves up in me: it's finished. Everything went past without me.
I think there are ways in which we censor ourselves; that's the most dangerous kind of censorship - that's how hegemony works.
I find myself thinking more about the past as I get older... maybe because there's just more of it to think about. At the same time, I'm less haunted by it than I was as a younger person. I guess that's probably the ideal: to reach a point where you have access to all of your memories, but you don't feel victimized by them.
I think, for one thing, all of us remember those teenage years and those songs that we fell in love with and the music scene that we were part of. So, in a certain way, music cuts through time like almost nothing else. You know, it makes us feel like we're back in an earlier moment.
And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.
We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There's simply no way to write well, though, if you're not reading well.
The way to cover our sin is to uncover it by confession.
The real pleasure of one's life is the devotion to a great objective of one's consideration.
Gratitude is like a flashlight. It lights up what is already there. You don't necessarily have anything more or different, but suddenly you can actually see what it is. And because you can see, you no longer take it for granted.
A wise man's questions contain half the answer.
At 49, I can say something I never would have said when I was a player. I am a better person because of my failures and disgraces.
You can't afford to hop around and act like a kid when you have to get back on defense and worry about the other parts of the game. But at the end, when the buzzer sounds, you have the luxury of hopping around and looking foolish for a while.
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