Giving anyone anything takes courage, since so many presents backfire. A gift conspicuously at odds with your tastes serves only to betray that the benefactor has no earthly clue who you are.
Interpretation
Giving gifts can be risky as they may not align with the recipient's taste, which can reflect poorly on the giver's understanding of them.
This quote by Lionel Shriver highlights the complexity and potential pitfalls of gift-giving. It suggests that true generosity requires a deep understanding of the recipient, as gifts that do not suit their preferences can inadvertently communicate a lack of insight from the giver. Thus, giving a gift involves a level of courage, as it exposes one to the risk of misunderstanding and disappointment.
In practice
During a wedding toast, referencing this quote can highlight the importance of knowing your loved ones when choosing gifts.
Yet if there's no reason to live without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacements amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay. Your children's answer, presumably, will be to procreate as well, and in doing so to distract themselves, to foist their own aimlessness onto their offspring.
For pity's sake, if you don't take a shine to a novel, there are loads more in the world; read something else. Continue suffering, and it's not the author's fault. It's yours.
In my country, we're sufficiently consumed by the concept of happiness that the right to its pursuit is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But what is happiness?
You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.
Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.
In order to fly, you have to give up the ground you are standing on.
The power of good is shown not by triumphantly conquering evil, but by continuing to resist evil while facing certain defeat.
Three millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Beside, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of Nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us.
Human beings are made up of flesh and blood, and a miracle fiber called courage.
I saw the bombs, and, like a kid, I looked back at them. Instantly there was fire everywhere.
One cannot run from a challenge without losing. To flee is signing a death warrant to dignity and character, and, having run, there is no return; one is a weakling forever. Meeting a challenge, though one may be defeated, gives strength, character, and a certain assurance that regardless of outcome, one will survive or go down fighting.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.