I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the surprising realization of one's value in an unfamiliar and challenging situation.
Alice Munro's quote captures the profound experience of being taken away from familiar surroundings, leading to a revelation of self-worth that is detached from one's previous identity or circumstances. It suggests that in situations of captivity or dislocation, individuals may discover aspects of themselves and their value that they had previously overlooked or taken for granted, highlighting the complexities of identity and value in human experience.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a discussion on personal growth in unexpected situations.
Sometimes our connection is frayed, it is in danger, it seems almost lost. Views and streets deny knowledge of us, the air grows thin. Wouldn't we rather have a destiny to submit to, than, something that claims us, anything, instead of such flimsy choices, arbitrary days?
Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
I just believed it easily, the way you might believe and in fact remember that you once had another set of teeth, now vanished but real in spite of that. Until one day, one day when I may even have been in my teens, I knew with a dim sort of hole in my insides that now I didn't believe it anymore.
You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.
A story is not like a road to follow... it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside it altered by being viewed from these windows.
It's certainly true that when I was young, writing seemed to me so important that I would have sacrificed almost anything to it ... Because I thought of the world in which I wrote -- the world I created -- as somehow much more enormously alive than the world I was actually living in.
Walk any path in Destiny's garden, and you will be forced to choose, not once but many times.
The way you cut your meat reflects the way you live.
It is as absurd to argue men, as to torture them, into believing.
There is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger.
Laws are the terms by which independent and isolated men united to form a society, once they tired of living in a perpetual state of war where the enjoyment of liberty was rendered useless by the uncertainty of its preservation. They sacrificed a portion of this liberty so that they could enjoy the remainder in security and peace.
Programs, systems and methods sit well in the ivory towers of monasteries or in the wooden arms of icons. Head knowledge comes from the pages of a theology text. But the invitation to know God - truly know Him - is always an invitation to suffer. Not to suffer alone, but to suffer with Him.
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