Life is sometimes novel-shaped, mocking the efforts of those authors who, in an effort to make their novels life-shaped, spurn the easy symmetry and cheap resonance of reality.
Interpretation
Life often takes unexpected twists and turns, contrasting with our attempts to create order and meaning in our stories.
In this quote, Stephen Fry suggests that life is inherently unpredictable and complex, resembling a novel that defies conventional narrative structures. Authors often strive to make their stories mirror the simplicity and symmetry of real life, yet true reality is often filled with complications and irregularities that can't be neatly packaged into a tidy narrative. Fry highlights the creative struggle of artists who attempt to capture the chaos of life while reality often resists such simplification.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about the unpredictability of life during a graduation ceremony.
I used many times to touch my own chest and feel, under its asthmatic quiver, the engine of the heart and lungs and blood and feel amazed at what I sensed was the enormity of the power I possessed. Not magical power, but real power. The power simply to go on, the power to endure, that is power enough, but I felt I had also the power to create, to add, to delight, to amaze and to transform.
To be human and to be adult means constantly to be in the grip of opposing emotions, to have daily to reconcile apparently conflicting tensions. I want this, but need that. I cherish this, but I adore its opposite too.
There comes a time when the blankness of the future is just so extreme, it's like such a black wall of nothingness. Not of bad things like a cave full of monsters and so, you're afraid of entering it. It's just nothingness, the void, emptiness and it is just horrible. It's like contemplating a future-less future and so you just want to step out of it. The monstrosity of being alive overwhelms you.
As someone who worked hard for a Labour victory in the 90s, do I regret it? Not really. It was bound to happen. And it'll happen with the next government, and the one after it. Because all governments serve us. They serve the filth.
It's now very common to hear people say 'I'm rather offended by that'.
You can't just say there is a God because well, the world is beautiful. You have to account for bone cancer in children. You have to account for the fact that almost all animals in the wild live under stress with not enough to eat and will die violent and bloody deaths. There is not any way that you can just choose the nice bits and say that means there is a God and ignore the true fact of what nature is.
And I said, 'That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and for all.
We have this habit of romanticizing the lives of writers. I remember when I was a kid, I was like, 'I want to be Kurt Vonnegut.'
my hands dead my heart dead silence adagio of rocks the world ablaze that's the best for me.
No sooner do we think we have assembled a comfortable life than we find a piece of ourselves that has no place to fit in.
The only picture I have of my childhood is the picture of me in kindergarten. I have this expression on my face - it's not a smile, it's not a frown. I swear to you, that's the girl who wakes up in the morning and who looks around her house and her life saying, 'I cannot believe how God has blessed me.'
Everyone dies. Everyone leaves. What matters is the things you build together before they go. What matters is the part of them that continues in you when they're gone.
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