You have to live to really know things, my love
The parent is the strongest statement that the child hears regarding what it means to be alive and real. More than what we say or do, the way we are expresses what we think it means to be alive. So the articulate parent is less a telling than a listening individual.
That is how I came to think that heavy and hard was the beginning of living, real living; and though I might not end up with a mark on my cheek, I had no doubt that I would end up with a mark somewhere.
Be willing to face life squarely and get down beneath the surface of life where the verities and realities are to be found.
Life requires things from you - if you're really living it and are really alive - that are really difficult and painful, and you can't avoid those things if you're really participating.
We are always getting ready to live, but never living... The wave moves onward but the particles of which it is composed do not... It cannot be but that at intervals throughout society there are real men intermixed . . . as the carpenter puts one iron bar in his bannister for every five or six wooden ones.
It is by acts (actions) and not by ideas (mere thoughts) that people [really] live.
