If you go through life, and you don't find the beauty in an unexpected place, then you really have a sad existence.
Interpretation
Finding beauty in unexpected places enriches life and brings joy.
This quote by Octavia Spencer emphasizes the importance of perceiving beauty in the ordinary and unexpected moments of life. It suggests that a life devoid of this appreciation may lead to sadness and emptiness, encouraging individuals to seek out and recognize the beauty that surrounds them in various forms, fostering a more fulfilling existence.
In practice
In a speech about personal growth, one could reference this quote to highlight the importance of perspective.
You have to get out of your comfort zone in order to grow. And as an actor, you don't become Meryl Streep by doing the same type of comedy. You get there by being challenged. And unfortunately, there's a lack of roles for women of color, so you actually have to be the engineer creating some of those roles.
I don't think there will ever be a time I don't write, and I hope there will never be a time I don't act.
There are so few roles out there. And even if it is a film that could be led by a black actress, how many times is that film going to get funded? Let's just be real. But it's not just black people. It's Asians, it's Hispanic people if you're not Salma Hayek. It's hard. It's hard to get films funded.
I think that young women and little girls need to see that they don't have to be the damsel in distress. They don't have to not show their strength. They don't have to be whatever the stereotype is or the tropes that we go to in our minds.
You just keep moving forward and doing what you do and hope that it resonates with people. And if it doesn't, you just keep moving on until you find a project that does.
I like to read, even though it was really tough, because I could go anywhere in the world in a book, and I could have so many adventures in a book.
Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself
It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them.
I wanted, I think, to acknowledge Luck: the chance of it, the benevolence of it in my life, and the brutality of it in the lives of others; made especially savage for children because they may not be allowed the good fortune of a lifetime to correct it.
There is an old poor man,. . . . Oppress'd with two weak evils, age and hunger.
Every person my size has a different life, a different history. Different ways of dealing with it. Just because I'm seemingly O.K. with it, I can't preach how to be O.K. with it. I don't think I still am O.K. with it. There's days when I'm not.
Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.