“Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of one's own resources.”
Source: NW
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Zadie Smith 81
British writer 1975Related quotes
“One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it.”
Source: Nightwood (1936), Ch. 6 : Where the Tree Falls
On rumors that he wanted a guest role as a villain on the BBC TV series Doctor Who.
A chat with Meat Loaf (2006)
“Man wants to own his existence. But no one owns time.”
Source: The Time Keeper
Letter to Sister Mary James Power (1 October 1934); published in The Wild God of the World : An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers (2003), edited by Albert Gelpi, p. 189 - 190
Context: I think that one may contribute (ever so slightly) to the beauty of things by making one's own life and environment beautiful, as far as one's power reaches. This includes moral beauty, one of the qualities of humanity, though it seems not to appear elsewhere in the universe. But I would have each person realize that his contribution is not important, its success not really a matter for exultation nor its failure for mourning; the beauty of things is sufficient without him.
(An office of tragic poetry is to show that there is beauty in pain and failure as much as in success and happiness.)