That's the first thing you learn when you busk in the New York City subways: you immediately join the ranks of the marginalized, the unhinged prophets, the Christian shouters, the Hare Krishnas, the Jehovah's witnesses, the father-and-daughter kitaro team, the violinists playing for their sickly wives.
Interpretation
Busking in New York City connects artists with other marginalized individuals, reflecting shared struggles and voices.
This quote highlights the experience of busking, or performing in public spaces, specifically in the New York City subways, where musicians and performers become part of a larger community made up of marginalized individuals. It underscores the idea that these performers share not just their art but also a unique bond with others who are often overlooked and who express their own truths, hopes, and struggles in public spaces.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about the importance of public art in urban spaces.
It is insufficient to say that my experience as a bully haunts me. Rather, my experience as a bully has been fundamental to the creation of my conscience, because it is what prevents me from making the basic human claim that I am a good person.
By turning our culture over to the spectacle of child stars and their growing pains, we simply wind up taking their childishness seriously and ensuring that they don't grow up at all. And neither do we.
Storytellers all, we humans might run out of time even as we triumph over the problem of running out of space. But we will never run out of stories.
Cooking is, to me, the perfect fusion of generosity and selfishness, indeed the resolution of generosity and selfishness, the answer to my torn nature.
I cook so that there is no absence. I cook so that I am always there, even when I'm gone, even when I die, and my cooking translates in my daughter's memory as, simply, this: time.
The premise and promise of Big Data is that there are no stories, only patterns; that the human preference for story is aligned with the human tendency for error; and that only through dislocations in scale - the scale of sample size and of time - will truth emerge.
Avoiding problems you need to face is avoiding the life you need to live.
I live in South Africa. I'm proud to live there. I've always said I want to be a comedian from South Africa in the world. I will stay in places for a bit here and there and pop into New York for a while, maybe stay in London for a year, but my home will always be South Africa. I enjoy it too much.
What I'm not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we've lived through, or feel we've had enough time.
Hunger has always been more or less at my elbow when I played, but now I began to wake up at night to find hunger standing at my bedside, staring at my gauntly.
Merely to breathe freely does not mean to live.
She would wonder what had hurt her when she found her face wet with tears, and then would wonder how she could have been hurt without knowing it.
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