I always say that my favorite people to interview are the people who are at the beginning and the ends of their lives because they have two alternate perspectives of the world, and neither of them are less profound.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the unique insights gained from individuals at the beginning and end of life, emphasizing the value of their perspectives.
Brandon Stanton highlights the richness of experiences and views held by people at the extremes of life - childhood and old age. By interviewing these individuals, we can access two distinctly profound outlooks that can offer deep understanding and wisdom about existence, society, and the human experience. This perspective suggests that wisdom is not confined to age or experience, but can be found in all stages of life.
In practice
Use this quote in a speech about the importance of listening to diverse life stories.
When you are interviewing refugees, each person you talk to has a different story that could come from a horror movie. So many people talk about seeing their families get murdered before their eyes. Then I go to Central Park, and people are talking about their third divorce and paying tuition.
Wherever I go, I just try to show normal life. If the work helps to dispel stereotypes, it's because I seek not to portray the extremities of a place, but the vast majority of people who are quite normal and are having normal life experiences.
I think that even though some of the things on 'Humans of New York' are kind of very personal and very revealing, I think the discomfort with sharing that tends to be overwritten by the appreciation of being able to distill the experience of your life into a story and share it with other people.
It's a very immersive and intense form of travel to walk around with an interpreter and stop random people on the street and ask them about their lives.
Somebody's willingness to let me photograph them, and willingness to tell me a story, has nothing to do with the words I say. It all has to do with the energy I'm giving off, which hopefully is very genuine, very interested energy. It's just two people having a conversation in the street. I think that's where genuine content comes from.
We are gripped by God’s will of love, and must help carry out that will in this world, in small things as in great things, in saving as in pardoning. To be glad instruments of God’s love in this imperfect world is the service to which we are called.
As a nation we began by declaring that all me are created equal. We now practically read it, all men are created equal except Negroes.
Thou madest man, he knows not why, he thinks he was not made to die.
The worst thing that can happen in a democracy - as well as in an individual's life - is to become cynical about the future and lose hope.
The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of their claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transciencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.
And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots.
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