“If you were wise enough to know that this life would consist mostly of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have?”
Source: The First Bad Man
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Miranda July 70
American performance artist, musician and writer 1974Related quotes
Revolution (2014)
Context: Who does a baby think he is before he can recognize his face in a mirror, before he’s taught his name, before he’s drummed into stagnant separation, cordoned off from the infinite oneness? Love is innate. We must be taught to hate, and now we must unlearn it, as the Buddhists say; let it burn, that which needs to burn, let it burn. The class system isn’t fair on them either, poor little sods—packed off to school, weaned on privatized maternity shopped in from a northern spinster. Trying to find love in the tangle of dismantled family. No one can be happy imbibing a poisoned brew. It’s poisonous for us all. They’ll gratefully sigh when we unlock them from their opulent penitentiaries, they’ll be grateful when their fallow lords and empty chambers feed the hungry and house the poor. They know contentment cannot be enjoyed when stolen. They need the Revolution as much as we do. The whole of human history is nothing new, the whole of your personal story is nothing true, you can do with it whatever you want to do—flick a switch, scratch the record off, look behind the veil. Anything you don’t want, discard; anything that hurts, let go. None of it’s real, you know—all that pain, all that regret, all that doubt, not thin enough, not a good enough mum, not a good enough son, not a good enough bum. You are enough; you’re enough; there’s nothing you can buy or try on that’s going to make you any better, because you couldn’t be any better than you are. Drag your past around if you like, an old dead decaying ox of what you think they might’ve thought or what might’ve been if you’d done what you ought. That which needs to burn, let it burn. If the idea doesn’t serve you, let it go. If it separates you from the moment, from others, from yourself, let it go.
remark to his friend Antonin Proust; as cited in: Manet by Himself, p. 304; as quoted in The private lives of the Impressionists Sue Roe; Harpen Collins Publishers, New York 2006, p. 241
Antonin Proust had recently become minister of Arts in France
1876 - 1883
Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/atlas-shrugged-2011 of Atlas Shrugged: Part I (14 April 2011)
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