Success Quote by Anita Brookner

Brookner’s line refuses the tidy moral math we’re trained to expect: behave well, get rewarded. Instead, she reaches back to a pre-Christian, pre-self-help universe where “good fortune” is not earned but bestowed, and the gods are less guidance counselors than capricious powers with appetites. The key move is her contrast between “being good” and “being bold.” Goodness implies compliance, social legibility, the kind of virtue that fits neatly into institutional life. Boldness is risk, spectacle, transgression - the act that forces the world (or the gods) to look up.

The historical subtext is doing heavy lifting. “Ancient gods” evokes Greek and Roman myth, where heroes are not paragons of decency; they’re driven, excessive, sometimes reckless. Odysseus survives by cunning, not purity. Achilles wins glory through ferocity, not kindness. Brookner is importing that pagan psychology into modern life: luck tilts toward those who disturb the equilibrium, who gamble their reputation, who take the kind of action that can’t be reverse-engineered into a lesson plan.

There’s also a cool, unsentimental view of power here. Fortune is framed as external, almost political. You can’t lobby the divine through niceness. You win attention through audacity. Coming from a historian-novelist steeped in social constraint and private disappointment, the intent feels corrective: a warning that virtue can become a hiding place, and that the world’s biggest doors often open for people willing to push, not people waiting to be deemed worthy.