#ordeal

People everywhere enjoy believing things that they know are not true. It spares them the ordeal of thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for what they know. ↗

— Brooks Atkinson

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#enjoy #everywhere #know #ordeal #people

I do strongly feel that among the greatest pieces of luck for high achievement is ordeal. Certain great artists can make out without it, Titian and others, but mostly you need ordeal. My idea is this: the artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business: Beethoven's deafness, Goya's deafness, Milton's blindness, that kind of thing. ↗

— John Berryman

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#artists #beethoven #goya #literature #luck

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

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#humor #shared-ordeal #friendship