The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
Don DelilloRead
The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.
Interpretation
True life transcends expression through words and cannot be fully captured by them.
Don Delillo's quote suggests that the essence of life and lived experiences cannot be fully encapsulated by language, whether spoken or written. It highlights the limitations of verbal communication in conveying the depth and richness of human existence, reminding us that there are aspects of life that remain ineffable and must be felt or lived rather than described.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about the limitations of literature in capturing real-life experiences.
The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.
American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.
For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.
I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.
[I]n the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape. β¨He is either on a horse or driving a car, depending, and either way heβs carrying a gun. β¨This is one of the essential images in American mythology.
Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.
History is rich with adventurous men, long on charisma, with a highly developed instinct for their own interests, who have pursued personal power - bypassing parliaments and constitutions, distributing favours to their minions, and conflating their own desires with the interests of the community.
All drugs of any interest to any moderately intelligent person in America are now illegal.
Should surveillance be usable for petty crimes like jaywalking or minor drug possession? Or is there a higher threshold for certain information? Those aren't easy questions.
When I am liberated by silence, when I am no longer involved in the measurement of life, but in the living of it, I can discover a form of prayer in which there is effectively no distraction. My whole life becomes a prayer. My whole silence is full of prayer. The world of silence in which I am immersed contributes to my prayer.
Everything in life is a metaphor.
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