It was something... the way a person's life picked up speed, the way a life was like a bullet aimed at one final target, impossible to slow or turn aside, and like the bullet, you were ignorant of what you were going to hit, would never know anything except the rush and the impact.
Interpretation
Life moves forward uncontrollably towards a final moment, with uncertainty about the outcome.
In this quote, Joe Hill reflects on the nature of life as an unstoppable force, much like a bullet being fired. He emphasizes the inevitability of life’s trajectory towards a final destination, where we remain largely unaware of what lies ahead, experiencing only the exhilarating rush of living and the eventual impact of our journey.
In practice
This quote can inspire a graduation speech about the unpredictability of life's path.
She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.
The mad sometimes drilled holes in their own heads to let the demons out. To relieve the pressure of thoughts they could no longer bear. Jude understood the impulse. Each beat of his heart was a fresh and staggering blow felt in the nerves behind his eyes and in his temples. Punishing evidence of life.
I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman's power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be. The author is unworthy of His own characters.
And in that fraction of a second before anything actually happened, Santino Corleone knew he was a dead man.
The caricature of Islam as a violent and intolerant religion is horrendously incomplete. Remember that those standing up to Muslim fanatics are mostly Muslims.
We have no right to prejudice another in his civil enjoyments because he is of another church.
A good cause can become bad if we fight for it with means that are indiscriminately murderous. A bad cause can become good if enough people fight for it in a spirit of comradeship and self-sacrifice. In the end it is how you fight, as much as why you fight, that makes your cause good or bad.
There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired.
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