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I love this quote from Philip Roth !
“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness,
so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an
overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans
cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come
at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf
with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as
equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get
them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them
wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you
get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell
somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since
the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a
dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is
not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is
living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful
reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're
alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being
right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you
can do that -- well, lucky you.”
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