Try any goddam thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn't, toss it. Toss it even if you love it.
Stephen KingRead
The harder you had to work to open a package, the less you ended up caring about what was inside.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Effort can diminish the value we place on the outcome.
This quote by Stephen King suggests that the amount of effort and struggle we experience in achieving something can lead to a decrease in our appreciation for the end result. It reflects on human psychology, indicating that when we struggle significantly to obtain something, our emotional investment might become detached from the actual value of what we receive.
Themes
EffortValueAppreciationStrugglePsychology
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about perseverance in achieving goals.
More from Stephen King
All quotes →Eddie discovered one of his childhood's great truths. Grownups are the real monsters, he thought.
Stephen KingRead
Hairstyles change, and skirt lengths, and slang, but high school administrations? Never.
Stephen KingRead
Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.
Stephen KingRead
That's the day's business. Thinking. Thinking and isolation, because it doesn't matter if you pass the time of day with someone or not; in the end, you're alone. He seemed to have put in as many miles in his brain as he had with his feet. The thoughts kept coming and there was no way to deny them.
Stephen KingRead
Late last night and the night before, tommyknockers, tommyknockers knocking on my door. I wanna go out, don't know if I can 'cuz I'm so afraid of the tommyknocker man.
Stephen KingRead
Similar quotes
Was it always my nature to take a bad time and block out the good times, until any success became an accident and failure seemed the only truth?
Lillian HellmanRead
The most excellent and divine counsel, the best and most profitable advertisement of all others, but the least practised, is to study and learn how to know ourselves. This is the foundation of wisdom and the highway to whatever is good. . . . God, Nature, the wise, the world, preach man, exhort him both by word and deed to the study of himself.
Pierre CharronRead
They are eloquent who can speak low things acutely, and of great things with dignity, and of moderate things with temper.
Marcus Tullius CiceroRead
Worry - a God, invisible but omnipotent. It steals the bloom from the cheek and lightness from the pulse; it takes away the appetite, and turns the hair gray.
Benjamin DisraeliRead
Talent! There's no such thing as talent. What they call talent is nothing but the capacity for doing continuous hard work in the right way.
Winslow HomerRead
I was taught to strive not because there were any guarantees of success but because the act of striving is in itself the only way to keep faith with life.
Madeleine AlbrightRead