I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.
What's quietly radical here is Oliver's refusal to separate beauty from risk—she doesn't want safety *or* beauty, but beauty *through* the willingness to be in danger. Most of us chase one or the other, building lives of tidy restraint or reckless abandon, when she's asking for something harder: the lightness that comes only after you've decided fear isn't the boss of you. When someone finally leaves a suffocating job or speaks an honest thing they've been swallowing, they often describe exactly this sensation—not triumph, but a kind of airiness, as if the weight they carried was doing more damage than the fall ever could. That's the dangerous nobility she means.
“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason...”
Marcus Aurelius“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. I...”
Viktor Frankl“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
Seneca