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.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the deep personal connection one can feel to certain stories that resonate with their own life experiences.
In this quote, Daniel Day-Lewis expresses the subjective nature of storytelling and how individual connections to narratives can vary. He notes that some stories draw him in deeply, creating a sense of belonging or personal relevance, even as he himself feels distanced from his own life. This speaks to the power of stories to evoke emotions and reflections on one’s own journey.
In practice
In a book discussion group, you might reference this quote when discussing how different readers resonate with various characters.
One 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.
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.
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.
I suppose it's a very highly developed form of denial, but some part of me completely denies that I'm a performer.
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.
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.
The main task of the spirit is to free man from his ego.
Tragedy, for me, is not a conflict between right and wrong, but between two different kinds of right.
I don't feel any vulgar gratitude to you[for helping me]. I almost feel as if You ought to be grateful to ME, for giving you the opportunity of enjoying the luxury of generosity. . . I may have come into the world expressly for the purpose of increasing your stock of happiness. I may have been born to be a benefactor to you, by giving you an opportunity of assisting me.
The psychology of a language which, in one way or another, is imposed upon one because of factors beyond one's control, is very different from the psychology of a language which one accepts of one's free will.
From an evolutionary standpoint, human consciousness has not been around very long. A little light just went on after four and a half billion years. How often does that happen? Maybe it is quite rare.
To get back up to the shining world from there My guide and I went into that hidden tunnel, And Following its path, we took no care To rest, but climbed: he first, then I-so far, through a round aperture I saw appear Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears, Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.