Learned helplessness is the giving-up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn't matter.
But I believe we all have an inner goodness; a little flame that stays alight through the worst of trials.
But there is one thing you must remember, if you forget all else. There is no good or evil, save in the way you see the world. There is no dark or light save in your own vision. All changes in the blink of an eyelid; yet all remains the same.
There was so much of beauty here: the neat, small tracks of a foraging creature, stoat or marten; the inticate tracery of a skeleton leaf, still clinging vainly to its parent tree as, little by little, time stripped it of its substance, leaving only the delicate remembrance of what it had been.
Our strength comes from that magic, from the earth and the sky, from the fire and the water. Fly high, swim deep, give back to the earth what she gives you.
If a man truly loves,. . . . He does not consider the obstacles, the restrictions, the reasons why his choice may be flawed or impratical. He gives no heed to what others may think. His heart has no room for that, for it is filled to the brim with the unutterable truth of his feelings.
Even in that time of utter darkness, somewhere deep inside me the memory of love and goodness had stayed alive.
I left the Midwest feeling like, "People are small-minded, they don't want to ask questions, they don't want to think out of the box. " Some of that was true.
My point of view is, I'm just a person, and there are times when I look at other people and think, 'My God, they spend so much time thinking about things that seem so absurd. ' But I'm sure people must think the same thing about me.
Even though I've been doing it for so long, I still feel fresh. Even when I walk out on stage, I still feel pretty much the same as I've always felt.
To many writers and thinkers, though not to all, another text is, or can be, the most naked and charged of life-forces. . . The concept of allusion or analogue is totally inadequate. To Dante these other texts are the organic context of identity. They are as directly about life as life is about them.