The point isn’t to live without any regrets. The point is to not hate ourselves for having them.
Kathryn SchulzRead
As a kid, I lived almost entirely inside books, and eventually the books started returning the favor. A lot of my internal world feels like an anthology, or a library. It's eclectic and disorganized, but I can browse in it, and that hugely shapes both what and how I write.
Interpretation
Books greatly influence our thoughts and creativity, shaping how we express ourselves.
In this quote, Kathryn Schulz reflects on her childhood experience of immersing herself in books. She describes how this deep engagement with literature has cultivated a rich internal world that informs her writing style and choices, highlighting the transformative power of reading and the eclectic, sometimes chaotic, nature of inspiration drawn from various sources.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of literature in education, you could say, 'As Kathryn Schulz noted, books can shape our internal world and influence our writing.'
The point isn’t to live without any regrets. The point is to not hate ourselves for having them.
Our love of being right is best understood as our fear of being wrong
To err is to wander, and wandering is the way we discover the world; and, lost in thought, it is also the way we discover ourselves. Being right might be gratifying, but in the end it is static, a mere statement. Being wrong is hard and humbling, and sometimes even dangerous, but in the end it is a journey, and a story.
We're terrified of not having the answers, and we would sometimes rather assert an incorrect answer than make our peace with the fact that we really don't know.
Regret doesn't remind us that we did badly. It reminds us that we know we can do better.
Learning is pleasurable but doing is the height of enjoyment.
I routinely interview college students, mostly from top schools, and I notice that their brains are like old maps, with lots of blank spaces for the uncharted terrain. It's not that they lack for motivation or IQ. It's that they can't connect the dots when they don't know where the dots are in the first place.
In our relationship with children and young people, we are not dealing with mechanical devices that can be quickly repaired, but with living beings who are impressionable, volatile, sensitive, afraid, affectionate; and to deal with them we have to have great understanding, the strength of patience and love.
Most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do—not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad.
You will be astonished to find how the whole mental disposition of your children changes with advancing years. A young child and the same when nearly grown, sometimes differ almost as much as do a caterpillar and butterfly.
I could undertake to be an efficient pupil if it were possible to find an efficient teacher.
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