Birds know themselves not to be at the center of anything, but at the margins of everything. The end of the map. We only live where someone's horizon sweeps someone else's. We are only noticed on the edge of things; but on the edge of things, we notice much.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the idea that individuals often exist on the periphery of larger frameworks, yet their unique perspectives on the margins offer valuable insights.
Gregory Maguire's quote conveys a philosophical view of existence, suggesting that individuals and their experiences are often not at the center of societal narratives, but rather at the edges where they can gain deeper insights. It highlights the notion that while people might feel unnoticed or marginalized, there is a significant richness in observing life from these boundaries, allowing for a broader understanding of one's place in the world and the interconnections between different lives and experiences.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about the value of diverse perspectives.
And of the Witch? In the life of a Witch, there is no "after", in the "ever after" of a Witch there is no "happily"; in the story of a Witch, there is no afterword. Of that part that is beyond the life story, beyond the story of the life, there is-alas, or perhaps thank mercy-no telling. She was dead, dead, and gone, and all that was left of her was the carapace of her reputation for malice.
She watched the sun bleed water out of the icicle. Warm and cold working together to make an icicle. Warm and cold anger working together to make a fury, a fury worthy enough to use as a weapon against the old things that still needed fighting.
The world rarely shrieks its meaning at you. It whispers, in private languages and obscure modalities, in arcane and quixotic imagery, through symbol systems in which every element has multiple meanings determined by juxtaposition.
The further on we go, the more meaning there is, but the less articulable. You live your life and the older you get- the more specifically you harvest- the more precious becomes every ounce and spasm. Your life and times don’t drain of meaning because they become more contradictory, ornamented by paradox, inexplicable. The less explicable, the more meaning. The less like a mathematics equation (a sum game); the more like music (significant secret).
In the lives of children, pumpkins turn into coaches, mice and rats turn into men. When we grow up, we realize it is far more common for men to turn into rats.
The moon rose, an opalescent goddess tipping light from her harsh maternal scimitar.
He wondered how he could ever have thought of the planets, even of the Earth, as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void. Now with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets - as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven - excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but by subtraction from, the surrounding brightness.
Yet as human beings we have to accept-with humility-that the question of ultimate origins will always remain with us, no matter how deeply we understand the brain and the cosmos that it creates.
Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.
The sense of being a separate, egoic self begins with the astral, not with the physical, body. The soul is individualized spirit.
Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.
We always long for the forbidden things, and desire what is denied us.
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