Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience--buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello--become new all over again.
Interpretation
Stepping out of your comfort zone allows you to rediscover everyday experiences with fresh eyes.
This quote emphasizes the importance of breaking free from routine and familiar surroundings to gain a new perspective on life. By leaving home and venturing into the unknown, mundane activities can take on new significance, leading to personal growth and heightened awareness of the world around us.
In practice
During a motivational speech about embracing new experiences.
The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we're not careful, pretty soon we're gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack.
Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.
I used to think...that I had to be careful with how much I lived. As if life was a pocketful of coins. You only got so much and you didn't want to spend it all in one place...But now I know that life is the one thing in the world that never runs out. I might run out of mine, and you might run out of yours, but the world will never run out of life. And we're all very lucky to be part of something like that.
I don't believe in reincarnation. I feel like we're here for such an appallingly brief period of time. I believe we each get this one trip, and if we're really, really fortunate, maybe we get 70 or 80 years on Earth.
My sister-in-law is a painter, and I'll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She'll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me all my life to get the skills to paint that painting.
The preciousness of life and the changes of weather and the beauty of seasons - all those things have always sort of dazzled me.
What could be heavier and more impenetrable than a rock, the densest of all forms? And yet some rocks undergo a change in their molecular structure, turn into crystals, and so become transparent to the light.
There came a time when you realized that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went.
It was too much work to remember things you might not have again, and so one by one they opened up their hands and let them go.
I'm just one generation between someone who cheered when Germans were burning and someone who doesn't even know that there is a border. That's a miracle - really is a miracle - and it gets me really emotional.
We should not forget that in the '60s, George Wallace's motto was 'segregation forever,' and that he did nothing to deter bombings and other acts of violence and, by his actions, condoned them.
And when I was angry, when I was younger, I was in a cocoon. Now I'm a beautiful, black butterfly.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.