When writing loses touch with the beautiful surface of the world, it loses its way. You always want to be in touch with how things look and what people say and what they call their dogs.
Garrison KeillorRead
Cleverness is a burden after that. You are supposed to settle down and be a good person, raise your children, and be good to your friends, which you may not have been back when you were clever.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Cleverness can lead to a sense of responsibility that redirects one's focus towards nurturing relationships and character.
In this quote, Garrison Keillor suggests that while being clever and intelligent has its advantages, it can also become a burden when it leads to expectations of maturity and responsibility. The quote emphasizes the importance of prioritizing personal relationships, being a good person, and fulfilling one's roles as a parent and friend, which might have been neglected in the pursuit of cleverness and recognition.
Themes
ClevernessResponsibilityRelationshipsParentingFriendship
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about the importance of character in leadership.
More from Garrison Keillor
All quotes →Travel is the art form available to Everyman. You sit in the coffee shop in a strange city and nobody knows who you are, or cares, and so you shed your checkered past and your motley credentials and you face the day unarmed ... And onward we go and some day in the distant future, we will stop and turn around in astonishment to see all the places we've been and the heroes we were.
Garrison KeillorRead
Thank you, dear God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough. Thank you for the rain. And for the chance to wake up in three hours and go fishing: I thank you for that now, because I won't feel so thankful then.
Garrison KeillorRead
I have taken so many wrong turns and been so careless with precious things and managed to lose, or break, or leave out in the rain so much that I loved.
Garrison KeillorRead
When you wage war on the public schools, you're attacking the mortar that holds the community together. You're not a conservative, you're a vandal.
Garrison KeillorRead
It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.
Garrison KeillorRead
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