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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects the duality of experiences shaping one's identity.
Daniel Day-Lewis highlights the contrast between his upbringing in a literary English household and his education in a more challenging environment in Southeast London. This dichotomy allowed him to understand that one can embody different identities and lifestyles, demonstrating the complexity of human experience and the impact of diverse environments on personal development.
Themes
IdentityDualityExperiencesUpbringingContrast
In practice
Example use cases
During a panel discussion on personal growth and identity, this quote can illustrate the complexities of one's background.
More from Daniel Day-Lewis
All quotes →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.
Daniel Day-LewisRead
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.
Daniel Day-LewisRead
I suppose it's a very highly developed form of denial, but some part of me completely denies that I'm a performer.
Daniel Day-LewisRead
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.
Daniel Day-LewisRead
England is obsessed with where you came from, and they are determined to keep you in that place, be it in a drawing room or in the gutter.
Daniel Day-LewisRead
Similar quotes
Stars, too, were time travelers. How many of these ancient points of light were the last echoes of suns now dead? How many had been born but their light not yet come this far? If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize that we were alone? I had always known the sky was full of mysteries - but not until now had I realized how full of them the earth was.
Ransom RiggsRead
The world of employer and employee, like that of master and slave, debases both.
Edward AbbeyRead
When a faith-healer commands God to perform a miracle, in the absence of a prayer that says, 'Thy will be done,' it is, as far as I am concerned, the most rank form of arrogance . . . The faith-healer Bosworth once said that faith makes God act. If you follow that line of reasoning God is in His heaven, but Bosworth rules the world!
C. Everett KoopRead
But they know about us, they know, the four corners, and the chairs nearby us. Discerning shadows also know, and even the table keeps quiet.
Wislawa SzymborskaRead
Manner is personality—the outward manifestation of one’s innate character and attitude toward life.
Emily PostRead
[Praying] demands that you take to the road again and again, leaving your house and looking forward to a new land for yourself and your [fellow human]. This is why praying demands poverty, that is, the readiness to live a life in which you have nothing to lose so that you always begin afresh.
Henri NouwenRead