My mother is a great artist, but she always treated her paintings like minor postcards. Had she pursued it, she would have been a great artist. Instead, she looked down on her art.
Isabel AllendeRead
I don't think the world will destroy itself in a nuclear cataclysm. On the contrary, we have the capacity to save ourselves and save the planet, and we will use it.
Interpretation
The quote expresses optimism about humanity's ability to rectify its mistakes and protect the planet from destruction.
Isabel Allende conveys a hopeful perspective on the future, rejecting the notion of inevitable self-destruction through nuclear warfare. Instead, she emphasizes human resilience and the intrinsic potential we possess to both save ourselves and preserve the Earth, suggesting that collective action and awareness can lead to positive outcomes.
In practice
During a climate change conference to inspire collective action among leaders.
My mother is a great artist, but she always treated her paintings like minor postcards. Had she pursued it, she would have been a great artist. Instead, she looked down on her art.
I never try to convey a message, I just want to tell a story. Why that story in particular? I have no idea, but I have learned to surrender to the muse. I become obsessed with a theme or with certain stories; they haunt me for years, and finally, I write them.
My life is about ups and downs, great joys and great losses.
I'm interested in people who have to overcome obstacles, people who are not sheltered by the umbrella of the establishment, marginals.
I'm a writer. In Latin America, they say I'm a Latin-American writer because I also write in Spanish and my books are translated, but I am an American citizen and my books are published here, so I'm also an American writer.
All summer, I read fiction because you must read for the pleasure and beauty of it, and not only for research. I don't read thrillers, romance or mystery, and I don't read self-help books because I don't believe in shortcuts and loopholes.
With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage.
You have forgotten the One who doesn't care about ownership, who doesn't try to turn a profit from every human exchange.
Through some combination of culture and biology, our minds are intuitively receptive to religion.
Everybody sees me as this sullen and insecure little thing. Those are just the sides of me that I feel it's necessary to show because no one else seems to be showing them.
If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted should betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every good fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death.
Panic is rare, looting is essentially insignificant, people are not terrified and trampling each other to flee from a disaster scene, but in fact are trying to manage a situation. We may in fact revert to some sort of primordial civility.
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