QuoteProject
Realism; fatalism; phlegm. To live in the Fens is to receive strong doses of reality. The great flat monotony of reality; the wide empty space of reality. Melancholia and self-murder are not unknown in the Fens. Heavy drinking, madness and sudden acts of violence are not uncommon. How do you surmount reality, children? How do you acquire, in a flat country, the tonic of elevated feelings?
Graham Swift
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote reflects on the harsh realities of life in a desolate landscape and the struggle to find hope and elevation in such an environment.

Graham Swift's reflection on life in the Fens highlights the stark and often grim reality of existence in a flat, monotonous landscape. He paints a picture of a place where melancholy and despair are common, prompting the question of how one can rise above such bleakness and find uplifting feelings amid the overwhelming emptiness. The quote suggests that confronting harsh realities is inevitable, but finding a way to navigate them toward more elevated emotions is essential for resilience.

Themes

RealityMelancholyResilienceHopeExistenceStruggle

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be used in a discussion about mental health and coping mechanisms.

More from Graham Swift

There’s this thing called progress. But it doesn’t progress. It doesn’t go anywhere. Because as progress progresses the world can slip away. It’s progress if you can stop the world slipping away. My humble model for progress I the reclamation of land. Which is repeatedly, never-ending retrieving what it lost. A dogged and vigilant business. A dull yet valuable business. A hard, inglorious business. But you shouldn’t go mistaking the reclamation of land for the building of empires.
Graham SwiftRead
What does education do, what does it have to offer, when deprived of its necessary partner, the future, and face instead with - no future at all?
Graham SwiftRead
Ah, children, pity level-crossing keepers, pity lock-keepers - pity lighthouse-keepers - pity all the keepers of this world (pity even school teachers), caught between their conscience and the bleak horizon.
Graham SwiftRead

Similar quotes

Thought is more than a right - it is the very breath of man. Whoever fetters thought attacks man himself. To speak, to write, to publish, are things, so far as the right is concerned, absolutely identical. They are the ever-enlarging circles of intelligence in action; they are the sonorous waves of thought.
Victor HugoRead
Nonviolence against humans cannot take firm hold in society as long as brutality and violence are practiced toward other animals.
Robert ThurmanRead
If life — the craving for which is the very essence of our being — were possessed of any positive intrinsic value, there would be no such thing as boredom at all: mere existence would satisfy us in itself, and we should want for nothing.
Arthur SchopenhauerRead
The American 'unum' has been lost since the Sixties. If this continues, there will soon be no unifying American identity and vision to balance the 'pluribus,' and the days of the Republic will be numbered.
Os GuinnessRead
War is not a life: it is a situation, one which may neither be ignored nor accepted.
T. S. EliotRead
The modern pantheist not only sees the god in everything, he takes photographs of it.
D. H. LawrenceRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.