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A desire for children, I suppose; for Nessa's life; for the sense of flowers breaking all round me involuntarily. [...] Years and years ago, after the Lytton affair, I said to myself, walking up the hill at Bayreuth, never pretend that the things you haven't got are not worth having; good advice I think. And then I went on to say to myself that one must like things for themselves; or rather, rid them of their bearing upon one's personal life. One must venture on to the things that exist independently of oneself. Now this is very hard for young women to do. Yet I got satisfaction from it. And now, married to L., I never have to make the effort. Perhaps I have been to happy for my soul's good? And does some of my discontent come from feeling that?
--
2 January, 1923

 

Virginia Woolf

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I have made many things wrong in my life. I should have made many things better in my life, not only to Nastassja but many things. If someone said to me, 'You did everything wrong in your life,' I would say, 'Okay, maybe you're right.' But my way is the only way I can exist. I can feel and express things to understand how true somethings is. People in my life have tried to change me, and I have blown up even more violently and I said, 'What, do you really want to distort me?' What's left, you have to do it your way. I don't need a Bible to tell me I'm doing wrong a hundred million times in my life. Everything I did wrong in my life I am suffering a long time. It's coming back and back and back and back to me for years. I am not ashamed to tell myself what I am doing wrong, but there must always be a way to understand that's all I can do. What I want to say is I tried, okay, I tried, and I'm not breaking my head that it's not happened. It's like a growing plant. This tiny things is coming out, you can feel it coming out, it's breaking through, so it may be one day that she will understand many more things than she understands today. Nobody can come to me and say, 'Why haven't you seen this and why and why.' I know what I have to do.

 

Klaus Kinski

 

I don't believe in playing down to children, either in life or in motion pictures. I didn't treat my own youngsters like fragile flowers, and I think no parent should.
Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature. Life is composed of lights and shadows, and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows. Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him from reality. The important thing is to teach a child that good can always triumph over evil, and that is what our pictures attempt to do.

 

Walt Disney

 

I have written my life in small sketches, a little today, a little yesterday, as I have thought of it, as I remember all the things from childhood on through the years, good ones, and unpleasant ones, that is how they come out and that is how we have to take them.
I look back on my life like a good day's work, it was done and I am satisfied with it. I was happy and contented, I knew nothing better and made the best out of what life offered. And life is what we make it, always has been, always will be.

 

Grandma born Anna Mary Robertson Moses

 

Why do men go to war? Is it not in some way to better their condition. All these new fangled notions that men fight for other things than their own personal advantage is pure delusion. It is the solid things of life that men are ever after, though some of them haven't the courage to admit it. What is love of country but love of it's good things?

 

Arthur Desmond

 

Four years ago, I stood in Cairo in front of an audience of young people -- politically, religiously, they must seem a world away. But the things they want, they’re not so different from what the young people here want. They want the ability to make their own decisions and to get an education, get a good job; to worship God in their own way; to get married; to raise a family. The same is true of those young Palestinians that I met with this morning. The same is true for young Palestinians who yearn for a better life in Gaza. That's where peace begins -- not just in the plans of leaders, but in the hearts of people. Not just in some carefully designed process, but in the daily connections -- that sense of empathy that takes place among those who live together in this land and in this sacred city of Jerusalem.

 

Barack Obama