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 last thing to collapse is the surface.
I think that if anything can be proved by natural theology, it is that slavery is morally wrong. God gave man a mouth to receive bread, hands to feed it, and his hand has a right to carry bread to his mouth without controversy.
New York is something awful, something monstrous. I like to walk the streets, lost, but I recognize that New York is the world's greatest lie. New York is Senegal with machines.
All these seven colors are part of one rainbow, yet they are all different. They have their own quality, their own identity, their own flavor to it. So it is a rainbow. The Divine loves diversity, that is why he made us all different.
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.
Sometimes I got my majors mixed up. A number of my fellow religious-studies students - muddled agnostics who didn't know which way was up, who were in the thrall of reason, that fool's gold for the bright - reminded me of the three-toed sloth; and the three-toed sloth, such a beautiful example of the miracle of life, reminded me of God.
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