If you try to create a type, you may end with nothing. If you do a good job of creating an individual, you may succeed at creating a type.
Interpretation
Focus on individuality rather than fitting into categories, as true success comes from authenticity.
F. Scott Fitzgerald emphasizes the importance of individuality over trying to conform to preconceived notions or categories. By nurturing and developing unique individuals, one can create broader types that resonate with genuine identity and success, rather than forcing a fit that may lead to failure.
In practice
In a motivational speech about the importance of personal growth.
Don't be so anxious about it,' she laughed. 'I'm not used to being loved. I wouldn't know what to do; I never got the trick of it.' She looked down at him, shy and fatigued. 'So here we are. I told you years ago that I had the makings of Cinderella.' He took her hand; she drew it back instinctively and then replaced it in his. 'Beg your pardon. Not even used to being touched. But I'm not afraid of you, if you stay quiet and don't move suddenly.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
It was about then [1920] that I wrote a line which certain people will not let me forget: "She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven."
The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.
But you can love more than just one person, can't you?
A sudden gust of rain blew over them and then another - as if small liquid clouds were bouncing along the land. Lightning entered the sea far off and the air blew full of crackling thunder. The table cloths blew around the pillars. They blew and blew and blew. The flags twisted around the red chairs like live things, the banners were ragged, the corners of the table tore off through the burbling billowing ends of the cloths.
People only say I'm angry because I'm black and I'm a woman. But all sorts of people write with strong feeling, the way I do.
While the laughter of joy is in full harmony with our deeper life, the laughter of amusement should be kept apart from it. The danger is too great of thus learning to look at solemn things in a spirit of mockery, and to seek in them opportunities for exercising wit.
Totalitarian states killed with impunity and no one was held accountable. That didn't happen in the West.
Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.
The judge is not the knight-errant, roaming at will in pursuit of his own ideal of beauty or of goodness.
Money is the seed of money, and the first guinea is sometimes more difficult to acquire than the second million.
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