I used to feel for years and years and years that I was very remiss not to have written a novel and I would question people who wrote novels and try to find out how they did it and how they had got past page 30. Then, with the approach of old age, I began to just think: “Well, lucky I can do anything at all.
Interpretation
The quote reflects a realization about the value of any creative endeavor, especially as one grows older.
Alice Munro's quote emphasizes a shift in perspective that often comes with age. Initially, she felt a sense of obligation to write a novel and sought to understand the process through the experiences of others. However, as time passed, she began to appreciate the mere ability to create, recognizing that the journey of creation holds more importance than achieving specific milestones.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech to encourage aspiring writers.
Sometimes our connection is frayed, it is in danger, it seems almost lost. Views and streets deny knowledge of us, the air grows thin. Wouldn't we rather have a destiny to submit to, than, something that claims us, anything, instead of such flimsy choices, arbitrary days?
I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.
Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
I just believed it easily, the way you might believe and in fact remember that you once had another set of teeth, now vanished but real in spite of that. Until one day, one day when I may even have been in my teens, I knew with a dim sort of hole in my insides that now I didn't believe it anymore.
You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.
A story is not like a road to follow... it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside it altered by being viewed from these windows.
I was hooked on aviation, made model airplanes, and never thought I would be able to fly myself. It cost too much. But then World War II came along and changed all that.
The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.
Over the years, I had nurtured the hope to be able to fly; to handle a machine as it rose higher and higher in the stratosphere was my dearest dream.
Because there is a force that wants you to realize your Personal Legend; it whets your appetite with a taste of success
You have to recover the capacity to imagine yourself as an ideal and figure out how to project that into the world.
For those who may ask what they can do to honor Neil, we have a simple request. Honor his example of service, accomplishment and modesty, and the next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.