“Every one of us is a minor tragedy. Most of us learn to cope.”
Source: Whiskey and Water
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Elizabeth Bear 3
American novelist 1971Related quotes

“You just learn to cope with whatever you have to cope with.”
Interview of 1996, quoted in "Lauren Bacall Dies at 89; in a Bygone Hollywood, She Purred Every Word" by Enid Nemy, in The New York Times (12 August 2014) http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/13/movies/lauren-bacall-sultry-movie-star-dies-at-89.html?_r=1
Context: You just learn to cope with whatever you have to cope with. I spent my childhood in New York, riding on subways and buses. And you know what you learn if you’re a New Yorker? The world doesn’t owe you a damn thing.

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder

“The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.”
Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)
Context: About the last place any of us can expect to learn anything important about the realities we have to cope with in our wistful pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness is a classroom. If we decided that schools must do whatever is necessary to help students to learn the concepts and skills relevant to the nuclear space age, we wouldn't spend much time sitting inside of small boxes inside of boxes — even with all the fancy hardware being developed to jazz up the Trivia contest. It's probably true that most of what we all know we didn't learn in school anyway. Moreover, developments in electronic information processing make the school as it presently exists unnecessary... the "new education." Its purpose is to produce people who can cope effectively with change. To date, none of the new "educational technology" has that as its purpose. Remember Santayana's line: Fanaticism consists of redoubling efforts after having forgotten one's aim. The developments in "educational technology" are intended to do all of the old school stuff better... but that's not the aim of the new education.

“It's not the tragedies that kill us; it's the messes.”
Interview, The Paris Review (Summer 1956)
Source: The Portable Dorothy Parker

“We learn to be grateful to life. Every day it gives us the opportunity to learn something new.”
Original: Impariamo ad essere grati alla vita. Ogni giorno ci offre l'opportunità di imparare qualcosa di nuovo.
Source: prevale.net
Language Education in a Knowledge Context (1980)
Context: The question, "How well does one read?" is a bad question... essentially unanswerable. A more proper question is "How well does one read poetry, or history, or science, or religion?" No one I have ever known is so brilliant as to have learned the languages of all fields of knowledge equally well. Most of us do not learn some of them at all.