If there's hell below, we're all gonna go.
Curtis MayfieldRead
My teacher told me I'd never amount to anything. I left high school at 15, after one year. But my real teachers were all the people around me. And I was a good listener.
Interpretation
Formal education is not the only source of learning; real-life experiences and interactions can teach us valuable lessons.
In this quote, Curtis Mayfield reflects on his early experiences in education, where he felt underestimated by traditional schooling. He emphasizes the importance of informal learning through observation and listening to those around him, suggesting that valuable life lessons often come from our interactions with others rather than from formal educational settings.
In practice
During a graduation speech to inspire students to seek knowledge beyond the classroom.
If there's hell below, we're all gonna go.
How many 54-year-old quadriplegics are putting albums out? You just have to deal with what you got, try to sustain yourself as best you can, and look to the things that you can do.
Reading the script, I started feeling very deeply bad for Freddie. Between his friends, his partners, and his woman, he was catching a hard time. 'Freddie's Dead' came to me immediately.
I was a very observant child. Almost anything could become a song to me.
I don't like to appoint myself to nothing, knowing I'm no better than anybody else. But it always makes me feel good to know I try to do the best I can, and those who might observe say, 'Hey, I can take a little something from that person.'
Everything was a song. Every conversation, every personal hurt, every observance of people in stress, happiness and love... if you could feel it, I could feel it. And I could write a song about it.
The child is an enigma… He has the highest potentialities, but we do not know what he will be.
The challenge as a parent is letting your kids fail in the right ways because that's where we do most of our learning.
I read Carver. Julio Cortazar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.
In all the twelve years I was at school no one ever succeeded in making me write a Latin verse or learn any Greek except the alphabet.
A dollar put into a book and a book mastered might change the whole course of a boy's life. It might easily be the beginning of the development of leadership that would carry the boy far in service to his fellow men.
The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and remake one's soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule.
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