I'd rather have two good friends, than 500,000 admirers.
E. E. CummingsRead
Nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else.
Interpretation
Each person must live their own life and take responsibility for their own existence.
E. E. Cummings' quote emphasizes the importance of individual agency and personal responsibility in life. It suggests that we are each uniquely responsible for our own experiences and cannot live for others, nor can they live for us. This realization is crucial for embracing the authenticity of one's own existence and the necessity of self-awareness in living a fulfilling life.
In practice
During a graduation speech to encourage students to follow their dreams.
I'd rather have two good friends, than 500,000 admirers.
I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance.
It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.
When god decided to invent everything he took one reath bigger than a circustent and everything began
The Artist is no other than he who unlearns what he has learned, in order to know himself.
If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.
In life you have a choice: Bitter or Better? Choose better, forget bitter.
How terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as extraordinary as living.
As I descended into impassable rivers I no longer felt guided by the ferrymen.
I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
I don't know if I found soccer or if soccer found me. Especially because when I was younger, I was doing it, in a lot of ways, because I wanted the attention of my mom and dad.
For some reason, I wrote about the bed we slept in when I was a kid. It was a half-acre of misery, that bed, sagging in the middle, red hair sticking out of the mattress, the spring gone and the fleas leaping all over the place.
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