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.
Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled. Each second was two hundred yards, to be walked, crawled. You couldn't see the next hour, it was so far in the distance. Tomorrow was over the horizon, and would take an entire day to reach.
Life is hard but so very beautiful
I have found life an enjoyable, enchanting, active, and sometime terrifying experience, and I've enjoyed it completely. A lament in one ear, maybe, but always a song in the other.
There is more to life than increasing its speed.
Life forms illogical patterns. It is haphazard and full of beauties which I try to catch as they fly by, for who knows whether any of them will ever return?
There were times over the years when life was not easy, but if you're working a few hours a day and you've got a good book to read, and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you're okay.
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