My hope is to create spaces where people of all stripes can come together and speak at a lower decibel level. We make more sense that way. We sound more like our real selves that way.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of creating calm environments for meaningful conversations.
Tracy K. Smith's quote reflects the idea that in quieter, more inclusive spaces, people can engage in deeper dialogue and express their true selves. It suggests that when conversations are conducted at a lower volume, they become more thoughtful and authentic, fostering understanding and connection among individuals from diverse backgrounds.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech about community building.
We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer.
I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by - the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment on a given day without even having chosen to.
I love the sense of looking at the sad, paltry, and yet very familiar spectacle that we must make from moment to moment in our lives, and in our frenzy, as something that's as out there as alien life.
Losing my father made me want to find out if I could come up with a version of God or the afterlife that I could feel like was acceptable now that both my parents are in it.
Prose is something that is persistent in staying in one place long enough to not only zero in on the dramatic effect of something that might have happened, or something that might have been seen, but also in watching how it played out and thinking about the cause and the effect.
A question is a pursuit, an invitation to envision and explore a series of possibilities, to struggle and empathize and doubt and believe. The question moves, whereas our sense of what an answer is can often be static, a stopping point.
Virtue isn't not wronging others but not wishing to wrong others.
Objects exist and if one pays more attention to them than to people, it is precisely because they exist more than the people. Dead objects are still alive. Living people are often already dead.
To Yossarian, the idea of pennants as prizes was absurd. No money went with them, no class privileges. Like Olympic medals and tennis trophies, all they signified was that the owner had done something of no benefit to anyone more capably than everyone else.
Thou shalt not transgress the carrying capacity
Everything must be free to be written and published without restraint.
The relations between rhetoric and ethics are disturbing: the ease with which language can be twisted is worrisome, and the fact that our minds accept these perverse games so docilely is no less cause for concern.
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