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don’t turn yourself inside out trying to make everyone love you. Instead, be on the lookout for two or three like-minded souls who’ll take you as you are and stand by you no matter what. Acquaintances abound, but true friendships are rare and worth waiting for.”
The point is less what you think it looks like than how it makes you feel. Good art, the best art, elicits a reaction of some sort, not always a positive one. It might make you feel peaceful or joyful or curious. But it could also make you feel angry or ashamed or afraid. The response will vary from person to person. But if the piece evokes something genuine, even raw, it has fulfilled its purpose.
failing to use her skills in that dark hour would have been an act of supreme ingratitude, an affront to God, serving to make the world and her character smaller and meaner and crueler and less.
you’ve got skills. Seems to me the selfish thing would be to keep them to yourself, rest on your laurels, and spend the next forty years playing bridge.”
“Books sprung from an author’s imagination can be just as meaningful as those based on facts, figures, and events, or even more meaningful. Novels force you to think—to make your own conclusions about characters and themes, and decide if they’re valid or relevant or true or good, or the opposite, or maybe somewhere in between.
I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody who was all one thing or the other, have you? Most people are a walking bundle of contradictions.”
The invisible fence of rules and mores that confined women to a small, carefully defined patch of human achievement impacted men as well, required them to carry the bulk of a family’s financial burden, even if it meant doing work they disliked.
“believing you have as much right to be in the room as anybody else, is half the battle.”
Somewhere down the road, maybe you’ll help pave the way for somebody else. That’s how the world gets better, Bitsy. One generation helping the next.”
More meant alive, knowing that her existence made ripples felt by others, that she was doing more than just sucking oxygen and taking up space, that she had something unique to offer.
‘There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens.’”
“It is a good life.” What would it feel like to say that and mean it? To have a purpose and know you had lived to fulfill it? Was this something that could be learned?
supporting the talents of others was a gift too, a calling that mustn’t be ignored.
The reason the girls in the group end up failing—not only to live up to their potential, but failing in almost every sense of the word—is that they stopped being the group. Once they graduated and it was every woman for herself, things started to go horribly downhill.”
A friend can give you a leg up to see what’s on the other side of the wall, but you’ve got to pull yourself over the top.
“You can have it all, just not all at the same time.”
