I think we are bound to, and by, nature. We may want to deny this connection and try to believe we control the external world, but every time there's a snowstorm or drought, we know our fate is tied to the world around us
Alice HoffmanRead
My mother, Abra, had taught me that all people are made from the same dust. When our days here are gone, all men and women enter the same garden.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes our shared humanity and the inevitability of death for everyone, regardless of their differences.
Alice Hoffman's quote reflects the idea that, at our core, all humans are fundamentally the same, made from the same essence. It suggests that despite the various paths we take and the lives we lead, when our time on Earth concludes, we all return to a common origin, symbolized by entering the same garden. This serves as a reminder to embrace compassion and understanding towards one another in life.
Themes
HumanitySharedLifeDeathCompassion
In practice
Example use cases
In a memorial service, to highlight our shared journey and destination in life.
More from Alice Hoffman
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Do people choose the art that inspires them β do they think it over, decide they might prefer the fabulous to the real? For me, it was those early readings of fairy tales that made me who I was as a reader and, later on, as a storyteller.
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I never plot out my novels in terms of the tone of the book. Hopefully, once a story is begun it reveals itself
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My theory is that everyone at one time or another has been at the fringe of society in some way: an outcast in high school, a stranger in a foreign country, the best at something, the worst at something, the one who's different. Being an outsider is the one thing we all have in common.
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My grandmother told me once that when you lose somebody you think you've lost the whole world as well, but that's not the way things turn out in the end. Eventually, you pick yourself up and look out the window, and once you do you see everything that was there before the world ended is out there still. There are the same apple trees and the same songbirds, and over our heads, the very same sky that shines like heaven, so far above us we can never hope to reach such heights.
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