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Quote by Jeannette Walls

Work

Half Broke Horses

This novel delves into the life of Permelia Snow, a young woman who faces the harsh realities of the American frontier during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It chronicles her journey from a young girl to a seasoned woman, as she learns to adapt to the rugged environment and the demands of life on the prairie. The story is rich with historical detail and offers a poignant look at the resilience and spirit of its protagonist. more

Author

Jeannette Walls
Jeannette Walls

Jeannette Walls is an American author who gained fame with her memoir, 'The Glass Castle'. The book tells the story of her upbringing in poverty and chaos with her family in the American West. more

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“The fragment is like a broken mirror - ideas don't have the time to reflect themselves in it or, as a result, to feel sorry for themselves. They run ahead of their shadows or their reflections. To run ahead is to move towards an unforeseeable outcome, but one whose path is made for it in advance. Birds too run ahead of those who see them. The event also runs ahead of history. It is what opens up untimely perspectives in a world brought totally up to date.”

“Of multiple unfathomable coincidences or complicities, we say: 'It's too good to be true.' And we invoke the Unconscious. But the Unconscious itself is too good to be true. Behind all that might there not be some cruel divinity or some external fate? But we prefer the id and the drives that are the psychical reappropriation of these things. We prefer our perverse desires, our masochism and our death drive to the ill-will of the gods. If it isn't I, ego, then it's the id. If it isn't the id, it's its brother. That is always better than an external demon.”

“The lesson to be drawn from X's fatal fall after leaving a moronic show: only go to shows where you would not mind dying immediately after seeing them. One cannot reasonably trust in the will, that 'rational' strategy that works only one time in ten. One has, rather, to clear the decks around a decision, leave it hanging, then let oneself slide into it, as though being sucked in, with no thought for causes and effects. To be willed by the decision itself; in a sense, to give in to it. The decision then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“If one resolves to be what one is, origins, filiation and all traces in general seem an undesirable supplement. Naive, captive, subliminal duplicity. Whatever happens, the double -that internalized otherness - dissociates itself from one's official being. In the face of this internal division, how is it with the unity of the real world? The distance of the child from those who see him as innocent, the wicked delight that takes root in the form of cunning, the innate sense of having his own preserve, which will never leave him, even if he becomes a civilized being. 'The point at which the intuition forms in the child that other people exist who think differently is the point at which he learns to lie.' Later on, he will perfect that duplicity by learning to lie to himself.”