No one knows what cuases an outer landscape to become an inner one.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the mystery of how external experiences shape our inner thoughts and emotions.
Margaret Atwood's quote suggests that the transition from an external landscape, filled with tangible experiences, to an internal landscape of thoughts and feelings is a complex and enigmatic process. It highlights the deeply personal nature of our reactions to the world around us and implies that individual interpretation plays a significant role in how we internalize experiences, making this a profound reflection on the interplay between our environment and our inner selves.
In practice
During a philosophical discussion about how experiences shape our identity.
If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.
I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.
We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.
I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.
Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society. ... A great society is simply a big and complicated urban society.
All lies are told with a straight face. It is truth that's said with a dismissive giggle.
I do not know if there is a more dreadful word in the English language than that word "lost."
The desire to live in our imagination is driven by this suspicion that we're disembodied sensibilities cobbled into our bodies. That idea has infused most of human thought since the very beginning.
One of the challenges Christians confront is how the politics we helped create has made it difficult to sustain the material practices constitutive of an ecclesial culture to produce Christians.
Magic: it was what happened when the mind met the world, and the mind won for a change.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.