One of my buddies and I share a passion for philosophizing. We call it “thinking about life.” This is the phrase we use when we ponder those abstract nuances of the living world, stopping ourselves to ask, “Why?”
Well, as it turns out, my dear friend and I are not alone. Many young women of the past sat around idle in their time, contemplating what it meant to be alive. Luckily for us, these pensive ladies wrote books and poetry about their thoughts.
They also had some great one-liners. My favorite part of any book is the note that comes just before the title page. In my mind, this is where I hear the voice of the writer in her most sincere tone.
I don’t particularly know where all of the following quotes came from, but I know that each one broadened my perspective, just by coincidentally stumbling upon them.
Some food for “thinking about life” :
“If you expect nothing from anybody, you’re never disappointed.”
-Sylvia Plath
Way to go Sylvia! Thanks for saying what everyone eventually learns but doesn’t want to admit. In our most romantic dreams we expect that if we work hard/find the right person/do all the right things, we can expect that the world will pay us bushels in success/love/personal fulfillment. In reality, life is not an X+Y=Z formula. It’s more like, “do what you love and work really hard and you might find tremendous success and become famous, or you might die in the gutter, a starving artist, but most likely you will fall somewhere in between.” It’s the mystery of the unknown that makes it all worth it, right?
Exception: I don’t think anything bad can come from expecting much of yourself. The right amount of disappointment can be a great source of motivation and a humbling (and accurate!) evaluation of the distance you stand away from your dreams.
Sylvia Plath
“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”
-Virginia Woolf
This is so true, but breaking away from this mindset is one of the trickiest things to do. I imagine it takes a person like Woolf to do so, being a great woman writer in a time of many great male writers. Can you imagine how self-conscious she felt publishing her work? As a woman, I sometimes find it difficult to put forth my opinions in classroom discussions, much less daring works of literature. Writing aside, this quote can be applied to anything in life.
“Whenever a thing is done for the first time, it releases a little demon.”
-Emily Dickinson
I suddenly have words to put to a feeling. This explains my addiction to new experiences, the large-scale relief you feel after doing something that makes your blood pressure skyrocket and your neck hair bristle. Is it because in doing so, we, like newly freed birds, escape the cages of other people’s expectations and experience what it feels like to soar into our endless potential?
Emily Dickinson
“Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be.”
-Alice Walker
I love this one because for a long time I felt like everyone’s opinion was better than mine. I believed that the opinions of people who appeared confident were automatically more worthy of consideration than my own. That’s the kind of thinking that digs you into an inescapable, powerless hole of self-deception. Truth is, we put the power into people’s ideas. Therefore, our voices have the potential to be just as powerful as any other person’s.
And my favorite…
“What all my work shall be, I don’t know that either,
every hour being a stranger to you until you live it.
I want a busy life, a just mind, and a timely death.”
-Zora Neale Hurston
Amen Zora, amen. Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Zora Neale Hurston