They are all alike you know. They hold their tongues for years and you think you're safe, but when the opportunity comes they remember everything.
Edith WhartonRead
What's the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose 'em out.
Interpretation
Creating mysteries can lead to curiosity and attempts to uncover the truth.
This quote by Edith Wharton suggests that mysteries serve no practical purpose as they only ignite curiosity in others, prompting them to seek out the truth. The statement highlights the human tendency to explore the unknown and implies that transparency may be more beneficial than obscurity.
In practice
This quote can be used during a discussion about the importance of transparency in relationships.
They are all alike you know. They hold their tongues for years and you think you're safe, but when the opportunity comes they remember everything.
They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods
Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.
And I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, & consequently suggests more tugging, & pain, & diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.
As he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. 'After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each otherβs angles,' he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep
There are two ways to spread happiness; either be the light who shines it or be the mirror who reflects it.
What did you put in the fire?" Kaladin said. "To make that special smoke?" "Nothing. It was just and ordinary fire." "But, I saw-" "What you saw belongs to you. A story doesn't live until it is imagined in someone's mind." "What does the story mean, then?" "It means what you want it to mean," Hoid said. "The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think , but to give you questions to think upon. Too often, we forget that.
Don't be too quick to draw conclusions from what happens to you; simply let it happen. Otherwise it will be too easy for you to look with blame... at your past, which naturally has a share with everything that now meets you.
Fortunately, the world is full of people with information compulsion who want to tell you their stories. They want to tell you things that you don't know. They're some of the greatest allies that any writer has.
Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns...We may want to love other people without holding back, to feel authentic, to breathe in the beauty around us, to dance and sing. Yet each day we listen to inner voices that keep our life small.
Not being untutored in suffering, I learn to pity those in affliction
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Do not despair if the answers don't come immediately. Some answers are only revealed with the passage of time.
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