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Analyzing Shel Silverstein's 'Picture Puzzle Piece'

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Preface A duck’s quack doesn’t echo. Some people might find a deep and mysterious meaning in this fact and spend hours, days, years, even lifetimes to come up with a theory. It’s simple but effective. Hard work and dedication to what whatever it is we believe in can strengthen our pride and brighten our attitude. No matter how foolish it may seem, anything can cause a spark creating a chain reaction to a journey of realizations and discoveries that can change our lives. My personal anthology is a chain reaction. It’s when vinegar first meets baking soda in a paper painted volcano, a baby’s first step, when a writer holds their first pencil, and the first paragraphs to this preface you’re probably just skimming through. Despite the subtle presence of a beginning, it has to start somewhere. Because, one day, the painted volcano will erupt, the baby will run, the writer will finish their …show more content…

Starting small is a great way to see our lives from a different perspective, and build up imagination and motivation to allow ourselves to change. For example, Shel Silverstein’s poem Picture Puzzle Piece emphasizes how important one single piece can define who we are like a “small tuft of hair” or “the Velvet robe of a queen”. These pieces that come in all different sizes and shapes are incredibly important and it’s up us “puzzles” to work hard to hold on to them. However, sometimes we don’t notice their importance and they begin to disappear one by one, "and then - gone” forever. Unfortunately, for those like Joan Didionsept, ”he was on his way home from work - happy, successful, healthy - and then, gone” in an instant; she could no longer reconcile with her husband ever again. Without our puzzle pieces, we would be lost and disillusioned. Like Silverstein’s poem and Didionsept’s story, these stimulations openly inspire new ideas to be

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