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.
The color of his pallor, however, was a curiously basic white - unmixed, that is, with the greens and yellows of guilt or abject contrition. It was very like the standard bloodlessness in the face of a small boy who loves animals to distraction, all animals, and who has just seen his favourite, bunny-loving sister's expression as she opened the box containing his birthday present to her - a freshly caught young cobra, with a red ribbon tied in an awkward bow around its neck.
If there is no contradictory impression, there is nothing to awaken reflection
I don't believe that in the name of the holiness of the city you have to put barbed wires, machine gun nests, mine pins and everything of that, in the name of the holiness of Jerusalem.
Actually, it's the other way round. In a poor country, the only consolation people can have is the one that comes from their beliefs.
Am I a weed, carried this way, that way, on a tide that comes twice a day without a meaning?
I’m me, and at the same time not me. That’s what it felt like. A very still, quiet feeling.
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