Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away.
Salman RushdieRead
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
Interpretation
The past is distinct and often unrecognizable from the present, shaping our experiences and memories.
This quote by L.P. Hartley suggests that the past is so different from our current reality that it feels like a foreign place with its own customs and practices. It emphasizes the transformative nature of time and how our perspectives can shift, allowing us to see the past not merely as a timeline of events but as an entirely separate realm of existence that influences how we understand ourselves and our lives today.
In practice
In a reflective speech about personal growth and how childhood experiences shaped who I am today.
Life is elsewhere. Cross frontiers. Fly away.
If I were going to begin practicing the presence of God for the first time today, it would help to begin by admitting the three most terrible truths of our existence: that we are so ruined, and so loved, and in charge of so little.
Never write about a place until you're away from it, because that gives you perspective
There is no such thing as a good war or a bad peace.
Know what it is to be a child? It is to be something very different from the man of today. It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of Baptism; it is to believe in belief; it is to be so little that elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, for each child had its fairy godmother in its soul.
Government has been a fossil: it should be a plant.
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