The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have.
Anna QuindlenRead
Whether talking about addiction, taxation [on cigarettes] or education [about smoking], there is always at the center of the conversation an essential conundrum: How come we're selling this deadly stuff anyway?
Interpretation
The quote questions the rationale behind the sale of harmful products like cigarettes, despite understanding their dangers.
Anna Quindlen's quote highlights the paradox in society's acceptance of products that are known to cause harm, such as cigarettes. It draws attention to the ongoing debate about addiction, taxation, and education surrounding smoking, suggesting that the root issue lies in the fundamental question of why society continues to sell such dangerous items, despite their adverse effects on health and well-being.
In practice
During a public health seminar discussing the impacts of smoking.
The life you have led doesn't need to be the only life you have.
The future is built on brains, not prom court, as most people can tell you after attending their high school reunion. But you'd never know it by talking to kids or listening to the messages they get from the culture and even from their schools.
I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.
With reference to the younger generation..."If the experience of their exhausted, insomniac, dispirited elders makes them decide they'd prefer not to go straight from the classroom to the cubicle to the coffin, it doesn't mean they're lazy. It means they're sane."
Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them.
I conveniently forgot to remember that people only have two hands, or, as another parent once said of having a third child, it's time for a zone defense instead of man-to-man.
Religion is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness.
Everybody sees me as this sullen and insecure little thing. Those are just the sides of me that I feel it's necessary to show because no one else seems to be showing them.
For some small number of people, a parental loss appears to be, ultimately, a desirable difficulty - again, not a large number.
Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which everyone in himself calleth religion.
A society is always eager to cover misdeeds with a cloak of forgetfulness, but no society can fully repress an ugly past when the ravages persist into the present. America owes a debt of justice which it has only begun to pay.
Remember that you are an actor in a play, and that the Playwright chooses the manner of it: If he wants you to act a poor man you must act the part with all your powers; and so if your part be a cripple or a magistrate or a plain man. For your business is to act the character that is given you and act it well. The choice of the cast is Another's.
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