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.
You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us
It hurts the spirit, somehow, to read the word environments, when the plural means that there are so many alternatives there to be sorted through, as in a market, and voted on.
Dear young people, listen within: Christ is knocking at the door of your heart.
That however the brains and abilities of men may differ, their stomachs are essentially the same.
Keep things at arm's length... If you let anything come too near you want to hold on to it. And there is nothing a man can hold on to.
I think there is a tendency for people to get rigid and caught up in their beliefs of what is right and wrong, and they lose sight of humanity. Being human has to come first before right or wrong.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.