The fringe benefits of failure
…Some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default.
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…Many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience never troubling to wonder how it would feel to be born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or peer inside cages. They can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally. They can refuse to know. I might be tempted to envy people who live that way except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia and that brings its own terrors. I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid. What is more, those who choose not to empathize enable real monsters, for without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.
J.K. Rowling
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