A Quote by Lawrence Douglas

It's not success that makes a person's life worthy of legend. It's provocative defeat, someone who struggled mightily and lost. And that loss can't just be gratuitous - there has to be something about his or her character that whittles that loss into something provocative.
There are a couple of strategies for writing about an absence or writing about a loss. One can create the person that was lost, develop the character of the fiancee. There's another strategy that one can employ, maybe riskier... Make the reader suffer the loss of the character in a more literal way.
There are many kinds of loss embedded in a loss - the loss of the person, and the loss of the self you got to be with that person. And the seeming loss of the past, which now feels forever out of reach.
Being a host or a guest or a pundit, you really want to say something that's interesting and potentially provocative, that's going to stick with people. The last thing you want to say when you're a politician is something provocative.
When you go through hell, your own personal hell, and you have lost - loss of fame, loss of money, loss of career, loss of family, loss of love, loss of your own identity that I experienced in my own life - and you've been able to face the demons that have haunted you... I appreciate everything that I have.
One of the grubby truths about a loss is that you don't just mourn the dead person, you mourn the person you got to be when the lost one was alive. This loss might even be what affects you the most.
The loss of something that is never thought of, felt, or sought for when lost is not a loss at all.
The one thing I like about the religion is, I'm never at a loss to do something. No matter what happens in my life, there is something for me to do so I don't feel as though I have lost control.
Just finding ways to be not provocative for provocative's sake, but to show an idea that hasn't been shown before, I mean that's interesting to me.
I once said to a boy, ‘You’re a really good kisser,’ and he said, ‘You’re only as good as the person you’re kissing.' I think it’s the same with the music. If someone [says], ‘Your music is really provocative,’ I’m only as provocative as the person that’s listening to it.
That, in essence, is the catastrophe of suicide for those who survive: not only the loss of someone, but the loss of the chance to persuade that person to act differently, the loss of the chance to connect.
Today, loss is something everybody feels. It could be the loss of a friend moving away. It could be your best friend moves to the other side of town or his family does. It's a loss.
I've been thinking about my life, my loss of friends, relationships, opportunities, money, my values. There's also the loss of relationship with my son and my daughter, who I've only met once. All that loss - I just got so good at blocking it out.
Loss as muse. Loss as character. Loss as life.
It is frequently said that speech that is intentionally provocative and therefore invites physical retaliation can be punished or suppressed. Yet, plainly no such general proposition can be sustained. Quite the contrary.... The provocative nature of the communication does not make it any the less expression. Indeed, the whole theory of free expression contemplates that expression will in many circumstances be provocative and arouse hostility. The audience, just as the speaker, has an obligation to maintain physical restraint.
There should always be something gratuitous about art, just as there seems to be, according to the new-wave cosmologists, something gratuitous about the universe.
Personally, I try to be provocative but not needlessly provocative in my work.
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