"One is taught by experience to put a premium on those few people who can appreciate you for what you are"
About this Quote
Experience is the blunt teacher here, and Godwin lets it do the hard work. “One is taught” carries the chill of earned knowledge, not the warm glow of self-help. It suggests a life lived through misreadings: the versions of you that get praised because they’re convenient, flattering, or legible to other people. The sentence is calm, but its calm comes from attrition.
The key move is “put a premium.” Godwin borrows the language of markets to talk about intimacy, as if affection and recognition are scarce commodities that require shrewd investment. That choice isn’t cynical so much as protective. After enough social noise - parties, workplaces, relationships where you’re interpreted more than understood - you stop treating approval as proof. You start valuing the rarer thing: accurate perception.
“Those few people” is where the subtext sharpens. Godwin isn’t pretending the crowd will come around; she’s arguing that the crowd isn’t the point. The line rejects the cultural impulse to be broadly liked, broadly followed, broadly affirmed. Appreciation, in her framing, isn’t applause. It’s a disciplined attention that sees what you actually are, not what someone needs you to be: muse, caretaker, rival, symbol, storyline.
As a novelist, Godwin knows how identity gets edited by other people’s narratives. This quote reads like a small manifesto against that kind of social authorship. The “premium” isn’t elitism; it’s triage. When life teaches you how cheap misrecognition can feel, you learn to pay extra for the real thing.
The key move is “put a premium.” Godwin borrows the language of markets to talk about intimacy, as if affection and recognition are scarce commodities that require shrewd investment. That choice isn’t cynical so much as protective. After enough social noise - parties, workplaces, relationships where you’re interpreted more than understood - you stop treating approval as proof. You start valuing the rarer thing: accurate perception.
“Those few people” is where the subtext sharpens. Godwin isn’t pretending the crowd will come around; she’s arguing that the crowd isn’t the point. The line rejects the cultural impulse to be broadly liked, broadly followed, broadly affirmed. Appreciation, in her framing, isn’t applause. It’s a disciplined attention that sees what you actually are, not what someone needs you to be: muse, caretaker, rival, symbol, storyline.
As a novelist, Godwin knows how identity gets edited by other people’s narratives. This quote reads like a small manifesto against that kind of social authorship. The “premium” isn’t elitism; it’s triage. When life teaches you how cheap misrecognition can feel, you learn to pay extra for the real thing.
Quote Details
| Topic | Friendship |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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