Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that every experience has both an internal perception and an external reality, each uniquely significant.
Zadie Smith's quote reflects on the nature of our experiences, highlighting the duality of how events are perceived internally and how they occur in the external world. This distinction underlines the complexity of human experience, indicating that our personal histories and the events that unfold in the world are intertwined yet distinct, shaping our understanding of reality in different ways.
In practice
In a discussion about subjective experiences in a psychology class, this quote can resonate.
Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - it's something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There's no proper term for it - original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better.
You know, you don't expect everyone to be as educated as everyone else or have the same achievements, but you expect at least to be offered at least some of the opportunities, and libraries are the most simple and the most open way to give people access to books.
He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.
We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.
I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
The door to the soul is unlocked; you do not need to please the doorkeeper, the door in front of you is yours, intended for you, and the doorkeeper obeys when spoken to.
If psychoanalysis clarifies some facts of sexuality, it is not by aiming at them in their own reality, not in biological experience.
Thin ribbons of fear snake bluely through you like a system of rivers. We need a cloudburst or soothing landscape fast, to still this panic. Maybe a field of dracaena, or a vast stand of sugar pines—generous, gum-yielding trees—to fill our minds with vegetable wonder and keep dread at bay.
Written forms obscure our view of language. They are not so much a garment as a disguise.
The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation.
The world is his who has money to go over it.
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