penbitten

You know what, it’s not your life. It’s life. Life is bigger than you. If you can imagine that. Life isn’t something that you possess; it’s something that you take part in, and you witness.

Let us visualize the secure man; and by this term, I mean a man who has settled for financial and personal security for his goal in life. In general, he is a man who has pushed ambition and intiative aside and settled down, so to speak, in a boring, but safe and comfortable rut for the rest of his life. His future is but an extension of his present, and he accepts it as such with a complacent shrug of his shoulders… But is he a man? Has he any self-respect or pride in himself? How could he, when he has risked nothing and gained nothing? What does he think when he sees his youthful dreams of adventure, accomplishment, travel and romance buried under the cloak of conformity? How does he feel when he realizes that he has barely tasted the meal of life; when he sees the prison he has made for himself in pursuit of the almighty dollar?…A man is to be pitied who lacked the courage to accept the challenge of freedom and depart from the cushion of security and see life as it is instead of living it second-hand. So we shall let the reader answer this questionfor himself: Who is the happier man, he who has
braved the storm of life and lived, or he who has
stayed securely on shore and merely existed?

We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and — in spite of True Romance magazines — we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely — at least, not all the time — but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.

I hadn’t realized how much I’d been needing to meet someone I might be able to say everything to.

In late 2000, J.K. Rowling was already staggeringly famous, and my colleagues and I nervously awaited her arrival. Turned out she was friendly, down to earth, and unmistakably brilliant.