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Factory Girls

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Michelle Gallen

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“Failure is an inevitable part of the human experience. It's how we respond to failure that ultimately defines us. In the face of failure, it takes everything to stay resilient, to pick ourselves up and try again, even when the odds are stacked against us. It requires perseverance & a refusal to be defined by our mistakes. It demands that we embrace failure as an opportunity for growth, learning, and self-improvement, rather than as a reflection of our worth or abilities. For it is through our failures that we learn the most profound lessons about ourselves and our capacity for greatness.”

“Coleridge was one of those unhappy persons-Donne, I suspect, was such another-of whom one might say, that if they had not been poets, they might have made something of their lives, might even have had a career; or conversely, that if they had not been interested in so many things, crossed by such diverse passions, they might have been great poets. It was better for Coleridge, as poet, to read books of travel and exploration than to read books of metaphysics and political economy. He did genuinely want to read books of metaphysics and political economy, for he had a certain talent for such subjects. But for a few years he had been visited by the Muse (I know of no poet to whom this hackneyed metaphor is better applicable) and thenceforth was a haunted man; for anyone who has ever been visited by the Muse is thenceforth haunted. He had no vocation for the religious life, for there again somebody like a Muse, or a much higher being, is to be invoked, he was condemned to know that the little poetry he had written was worth more than all he could do with the rest of his life. The author of Biographia Litteraria was already a ruined man. Sometimes, however, to be a 'ruined man' is Itself a vocation.”

“Hold this thought: Right when you are most defeated–suicidal, perhaps–exhausted, positive of perpetual failure: this is when the epiphany is likely to arrive. One needs to be beaten down to think, and to think so as to escape. To escape death or boredom or the second act that simply will not do as you wish. Or the marriage that is stalled. Whatever is bearing down on you is a great teacher. Calm down and listen and crawl from beneath it a better person.”