The ability of humans to read meaning into patterns is the most defining characteristic we have.
Interpretation
Humans have a unique skill for interpreting patterns and finding meaning in them.
Eleanor Catton's quote highlights the essential human trait of pattern recognition and the tendency to derive significance from these patterns. This ability distinguishes humanity from other species and shapes our understanding of the world, influencing everything from art and culture to science and technology.
In practice
In a motivational speech about creativity, one might quote Catton to emphasize the importance of seeing connections in our experiences.
My sense of injustice about our family's 'weirdness' in not owning a car was amplified by the fact that we did not own a television, either - my parents were unapologetic about this and told me very cheerfully that I would thank them for it when I was older, which was quite true.
Often I listen to songs on repeat for days and days at a time. There's something hypnotic or meditative, and it mirrors the way that I am putting the sentence together, going back over the same phrases again and again.
For although a man is judged by his actions, by what he has said and done, a man judges himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done—a judgment that is necessarily hampered, not only by the scope and limits of his imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.
Writing is exhilarating, but reading reviews is not. I've been really devastated by 'good' reviews because they misunderstand the project of the book. It can be strangely galvanising to get a 'bad' one.
It is a mark of the depth of their wounding that they are pretending they suspected it all along. Everything that they have seen and been told about love so far has been an inside perspective, and they are not prepared for the crashing weight of this exclusion. It dawns on them now how much they never saw and how little they were wanted, and with this dawning comes a painful re-imagining of the self as peripheral, uninvited, and utterly minor.
I see disappointment as something small and aggregate rather than something unified or great. With a little effort, every failure can be turned into something good.
We all live every day in virtual environments, defined by our ideas.
There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto-God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.
Remember that your perception of the world is a reflection of your state of consciousness. You are not separate from it, and there is no objective world out there. Every moment, _x000D_ your consciousness creates the world that you inhabit.
If we try to secure the well-being of others, we will, at the same time, create the conditions for our own.
Outside speech, the association that is made in the memory between words having something in common creates different groups, series, families, within which very diverse relations obtain but belonging to a single category: these are associative relations.
In the poor and outcast we see Christ’s face; by loving and helping the poor, we love and serve Christ.
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