Here are some useful notes from J. K. Rowling’s book Very Good Lives.
- Poverty entails a thousand petty humiliations and hardships.
- Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the captive of the Fates.
- Failure teaches us things about ourselves that cannot be learnt in any other way.
- You will never know yourself truly until you are faced with adversity.
- Your qualifications, your CV are not your life. Life is difficult and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control. Humility to know this will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.
- Imagination, in its most revelatory capacity, is the power in us to empathize with people whose experiences we have never shared.
- Choosing to live in narrow spaces without empathy brings its own terrors. The willfully unimaginative is more afraid.
- What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.
- As a tale, so is life. Not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.