I am only at home in the present.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of living in the moment and experiencing life as it happens.
Gore Vidal's quote, 'I am only at home in the present,' reflects the idea that true comfort and fulfillment can only be found by being fully engaged in the current moment. This perspective encourages individuals to let go of past regrets and future anxieties, highlighting the significance of embracing the here and now as the only reality we can truly inhabit.
In practice
In a motivational speech about mindfulness during a wellness seminar.
We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
American writers want to be not good but great; and so are neither.
Writing fiction has become a priestly business in countries that have lost their faith.
The important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.
For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more.
Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society.... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.
I can be jubilant one moment and pensive the next, and a cloud could go by and make that happen.
There's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be.
A man's face as a rule says more, and more interesting things, than his mouth, for it is a compendium of everything his mouth will ever say, in that it is the monogram of all this man's thoughts and aspirations.
I believe in the American tradition of separation of church and state which is expressed in the First Amendment to the Constitution. By my office - and by personal conviction - I am sworn to uphold that tradition.
The fish in the water is silent, the animals on the earth is noisy, the bird in the air is singing. But man has in him the silence of the sea, the noise of the earth and the music of the air.
Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past. In this he became a master when he discovered that the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by the citability and that in place of its authority there had arisen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive it of βpeace of mind,β the mindless peace of complacency.
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