Book review: Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination by J.K. Rowling
Rating: 5 out of 5
A delightful find. I was browsing the shelves at my library and stumbled across this. And thought I’d take it home for a look. Simply, but nicely, illustrated. Some lovely thoughts about failure and about imagination. A short but worthwhile read.
Highlighted passages:
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
Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond any one’s total control
Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation; in its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared
Unlike any other creature on this planet, human beings can learn and understand without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places
We touch other people’s lives simply by existing
We do not need magic to transform our world; we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better
Originally posted to my Goodreads account