What matters is not what is being done of us, but what we do ourselves with what has been done of us.
Original (French):
L’important n’est pas ce qu’on fait de nous mais ce que nous faisons nous-même de ce qu’on a fait de nous.
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr (1952), p. 55
We learn [such literature] not for life but for classtime.
Non vitae sed scholae discimus.
You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was young I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn. Now, pick up your feet, into the firehouse with you!
— Another failure.
— No, it will only be a failure if you stop trying. Right now, it's experience.
How barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment.
If only my life could be more like the movies. I want an angel to swoop down like he does to Jimmy Stewart... in It's a Wonderful Life and talk me out of suicide. I've always waited for that one moment of truth to set me free... and change my life forever. But he won't come. It doesn't happen that way. All the drugs, all the therapy... the fights, anger, guilt, Rafe, suicidal thoughts. All of that was part of some slow recovery process. The same way I went down, I came back up... gradually, and then suddenly.
— How are we supposed to give advice without dragging our baggage into it?
— Maybe our baggage informs our advice, gives us perspective, maybe even wisdom.
— Maybe you're confusing baggage with experience.
— What's the difference?
There is a kind of magicness about going far away and then coming back all changed.