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.
Daniel Day-LewisRead
I come from not just a household but a country where the finesse of language, well-balanced sentence, structure, syntax, these things are driven into us, and my parents, bless them, are great custodians of the English language.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of language and structure in communication, shaped by upbringing.
Daniel Day-Lewis reflects on how his background, both in his family and country, has instilled in him an appreciation for the nuances of language and communication. He acknowledges his parents' influence as guardians of the English language, highlighting the significant role that education and environment play in shaping one's linguistic abilities and understanding.
In practice
During a speech on the value of arts education, I could use this quote to illustrate how language shapes our understanding.
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.
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.
I never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.
School divides life into two segments, which are increasingly of comparable length. As much as anything else, schooling implies custodial care for persons who are declared undesirable elsewhere by the simple fact that a school has been built to serve them.
I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous customs in the world, considering us as a civilized and a Christian country, that we deny the advantages of learning to women.
Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.
The quality of your public education shouldn't be defined by your zip code.
Media literacy is not just important, it's absolutely critical. It's going to make the difference between whether kids are a tool of the mass media or whether the mass media is a tool for kids to use.
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