Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal.
Interpretation
Life can seem strange from one angle, but a shift in perspective reveals its normalcy.
In this quote, Jonathan Franzen reflects on the nature of perception in life. He suggests that our experiences can initially appear odd or bewildering when viewed from a certain standpoint. However, with a slight change in perspective, what once seemed unusual can become understandable or 'normal.' This highlights the importance of flexibility in how we interpret our lives and the world around us.
In practice
Use this quote in a discussion about how to approach challenging life situations.
Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.
The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn't covetous, he wasn't envious. But without money he was hardly a man.
Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake.
If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life.
To read is to have experiences; every book changes my life at least a little bit. The first time I can remember this happening was when I was 10, with a biography of Thomas Edison.
Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
I believe that there is a greater power in the world than the evil power of military force, of nuclear bombs -- there is the power of good, of morality, of humanitarianism.
What consoles one nowadays is not repentance but pleasure. Repentance is quite out of date.
There is America, which at this day serves for little more than to amuse you with stories of savage men and uncouth manners, yet shall, before you taste of death, show itself equal to the whole of that commerce which now attracts the envy of the world.
Biophilia, if it exists, and I believe it exists, is the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms.
Not only during the ascent, but also during the descent my willpower is dulled. The longer I climb the less important the goal_x000D_ seems to me, the more indifferent I become to myself. My attention_x000D_ has diminished, my memory is weakened. My mental fatigue is now_x000D_ greater than the bodily. It is so pleasant to sit doing nothing - and therefore so dangerous. Death through exhaustion is like death_x000D_ through freezing - a pleasant one.
And there we all were, as invisible as you could wish to see.
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