Hopes were wallflowers. Hopes hugged the perimeter of a dance floor in your brain, tugging at their party lace, all perfume and hems and doomed expectation. They fanned their dance cards, these guests that pressed against the walls of your heart.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the fragility and often overlooked nature of hopes and dreams within one's mind and emotions.
Karen Russell's quote poetically illustrates the concept of hopes as delicate, timid entities that linger at the edges of our consciousness and emotions. By describing hopes as 'wallflowers' at a dance, she conveys how they often go unnoticed and unrecognized, despite their longing to actively engage in the dance of life. It suggests that hopes are filled with beauty and aspiration yet seem overshadowed by the weight of expectation and the fear of disappointment.
In practice
This quote could be shared during a motivational talk about pursuing one's dreams despite challenges.
No, I don’t have to tell a soul about this, I promised myself. When you are a kid, you don’t know yet that a secret, like an animal, can evolve. Like an animal, a secret can develop a self-preserving intelligence. Shaglike, mute and thick, a knowledge with a fur: your secret.
Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meanings can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart.
Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.
What is a good man? A teacher of a bad man. What is a bad man? A good man's charge?
We believe deep down that we've lost something precious and are seeking it outside ourselves, never realizing that we are carrying it within us wherever we go.
The ultimate goal of theology isn't knowledge, but worship. If our learning and knowledge of God do not lead to the joyful praise of God, we have failed. We learn only that we might laud, which is to say that theology without doxology is idolatry. The only theology worth studying is a theology that can be sung!
America is said to have the highest per capita boredom of any spot on earth! We know that because we have the greatest number of artificial amusements of any country. People have become so empty that they can't even entertain themselves. They have to pay other people to amuse them, to make then laugh, to try to make them feel warm and happy and comfortable for a few minutes, to try to lose that awful, frightening, hollow feeling-that terrible, dreaded feeling of being lost and alone.
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