A Quote by Lev Grossman
That was the thing about the world: it wasn't that things were harder than you thought they were going to be, it was that they were hard in ways that you didn't expect.
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The things I thought were so important -- because of the effort I put into them -- have turned out to be of small value. And the things I never thought about, the things I was never able to either to measure or to expect, were the things that mattered.
We thought that the odds of things working OK were up in the upper 90 percent or we wouldn't have gone. But the - there were some problems cropped up on the flight but was able to take care of those OK and - although they were things that we hadn't really trained that much for. But it was the time of the Cold War and so there were was a lot of pressure on the - to get going and the Russians were claiming that they were - Soviets were claiming they were ahead of us in technology.
Our friendship was like our writing in some ways. It was the only thing that was interesting about our otherwise dull lives. We were better off when we were together. Together we were a small society of ambition and high ideals. We were tender and patient and kind. We were not like the world at all.
My parents were fairly laid-back, but there were certain things about which they were very strict. My brother and I were told never to turn away a person in need. And it didn't matter what we thought of their motives, whether they were truly in need or not.
If you were in the film industry at that time, you were always picked up by directors who were much older. You were whisked about and shown things. I did work very hard though.
I think when I started in wrestling, I hadn't realized how difficult locker rooms were going to be. I thought they were going to be more inviting than they were.
Even as a kid, I saw the world in my own way and thought most things that were different were beautiful and magical. Even things that other people thought were horrifying and disgusting and weird.
My parents were just as smart as I am, just as hard working if not harder; I think my father and grandfather were probably better men, yet I've been able to accomplish things professionally that they were not able to.
As a child, every North Korean is very happy. We were very happy because we learned horrible things about the outside world, like in America and Japan. We thought they were suffering; that's why we were very happy... but in reality, we were living under fear.
The only way we can fly planes and use computers is because people were curious about their world and also skeptical about the things they were told to be immutable, so they figured out other ways of doing things.
I was brought up by a Victorian Grandmother. We were taught to work jolly hard. We were taught to prove yourself; we were taught self reliance; we were taught to live within our income. You were taught that cleanliness is next to Godliness. You were taught self respect. You were taught always to give a hand to your neighbour. You were taught tremendous pride in your country. All of these things are Victorian values. They are also perennial values. You don't hear so much about these things these days, but they were good values and they led to tremendous improvements in the standard of living.
We were the ultimate consumers of the thing, and we thought, "Every college kid is going to go berserk. High school kids - it will introduce them to music they didn't know about. This is going to be a phenomenon." Plus, it seemed like it was insider-y, yet it was available to everyone. I thought, "Cable companies are going to be snatching this up." You think about the dreck that is on so many cable companies, of course they're going to love this. And we were just crushed that nobody cared.
I've always resented the smug statements of politicians, media commentators, corporate executives who talked of how, in America, if you worked hard you would become rich. The meaning of that was if you were poor it was because you hadn't worked hard enough. I knew this was a lite, about my father and millions of others, men and women who worked harder than anyone, harder than financiers and politicians, harder than anybody if you accept that when you work at an unpleasant job that makes it very hard work indeed.
Go back to the Bible, the Old Testament. I mean there were people who we would call intelectuals, there, they were called prophets, but they were basically intelectuals: they were people who were doing critical, geopolitical analysis, talking about the decisions of the king were going to lead to destruction; condemning inmorality, calling for justice for widows and orphans. What we would call dissident intelectuals. Were they nicely treated? No, they were driven into the desert, they were imprisoned, they were denounced. They were intelectuals who conformed.
You were the one who made things different, you were the one who took me in. You were the one thing I could count on, above all, you were my friend.
People give you a hard time about being a kid at twelve. They didn't want to give you Halloween candy anymore. They said things like, “If this were the Middle Ages, you'd be married and you'd own a farm with about a million chickens on it.” They were trying to kick you out of childhood. Once you were gone, there was no going back, so you had to hold on as long as you could.
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