I can't honestly account for the very personal response that I have to one story and not another, a sense of an orbit, the orbit of a world that draws me as my own life recedes.
Daniel Day-LewisRead
England is obsessed with where you came from, and they are determined to keep you in that place, be it in a drawing room or in the gutter.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights societal fixation on one's origins and the constraints it imposes on individuals.
Daniel Day-Lewis expresses a critical view of English society's preoccupation with social status and origins. He suggests that this obsession creates rigid categories that confine individuals, whether they occupy privileged spaces or marginalized positions. It reflects broader themes of class and identity, emphasizing how societal norms can restrict personal growth and freedom.
Themes
SocietyStatusClassIdentityOrigins
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion on class disparity in a community meeting.
More from Daniel Day-Lewis
All quotes βOne of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.
Daniel Day-LewisRead
You don't merely give over your creativity to making a film - you give over your life! In theatre, by contrast, you live these two rather strange lives simultaneously; you have no option but to confront the mould on last night's washing-up.
Daniel Day-LewisRead
When I've gone back to work, it's always with that sense of inevitability. That may be a complete delusion, but it's the one that I need to get out of bed and go about my business. That sense that I can't avoid this thing. I better just get on with it.
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I suppose it's a very highly developed form of denial, but some part of me completely denies that I'm a performer.
Daniel Day-LewisRead
I don't torture myself. And I do the work because of the pleasure involved. I'm satisfying a compulsion I find nigh-on irresistible. It's not necessarily because of the work itself. I just feel the need for a period of regeneration afterwards. Like leaving a field fallow when you've grazed too much on it. I feel depleted.
Daniel Day-LewisRead
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