I look at my voice and my abilities as a gift. I don't feel that I can even take any credit for it, but it's such a huge presence in my life. It is my life. It's my identity, it's everything. And it's given me a great deal of joy and a sense of purpose - I can't imagine my life without it.
Interpretation
This quote expresses the appreciation for one’s talents as essential elements of identity and purpose.
Emmylou Harris emphasizes the significance of her voice and abilities, regarding them not merely as skills, but as intrinsic gifts that shape her identity and provide her with immense joy and purpose. She feels a deep connection to these gifts and recognizes that they are foundational to her existence, highlighting the profound impact that art and personal expression can have on a person's life.
In practice
In a speech at an awards ceremony, one might say, 'Like Emmylou Harris, I see my talents as gifts that define who I am and bring me joy.'
You really do learn every day with every dog; they are all so unique and different. But if you're patient and you understand where they're coming from, and if you are consistent, they will be fine. They teach you to give your full attention.
Animals have a much better attitude to life and death than we do. They know when their time has come. We are the ones that suffer when they pass, but it's a healing kind of grief that enables us to deal with other griefs that are not so easy to grab hold of.
I find with records, they become what they're going to become. They take on a power and a direction of their own. Part of making records is to honor that and not try to force it.
There's a certain grace in accepting what your life is and embracing all the good things that have been - but there's still an expectation of good things to come. Not necessarily what you expected.
I didn't have any money. I had a sense of terrible loss. But what I also had was a fire in my belly. I wasn't going to go back to waiting tables. I felt I had to be better at fronting a band.
A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects?
I want to say at once that I frankly believe that Irving Berlin is the greatest songwriter that has ever lived.... His songs are exquisite cameos of perfection, and each one of them is as beautiful as its neighbor. Irving Berlin remains, I think, America's Schubert.
Believe me... I've made a career out of being the right thing in the wrong space and the wrong thing in the right space. That's one thing... I really do know about.
Do you know what elegance is? It is not only what you're wearing. It is how you wear it. who you are inside.
Each flitch, each board, each plank can have only one ideal use. The woodworker, applying a thousand skills, must find that ideal use and then shape the wood to realize its true potential.
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