some mornings... I sit at the kitchen table shaking salt into the hairs on my arm, and a feeling shoves up in me: it's finished. Everything went past without me.
Jennifer EganRead
I think there are ways in which we censor ourselves; that's the most dangerous kind of censorship - that's how hegemony works.
Interpretation
Self-censorship can be more harmful than external censorship as it shapes our thoughts and actions.
In this quote, Jennifer Egan highlights the critical issue of self-censorship, suggesting that the greatest threat to freedom comes not from external forces but from our own minds. When we censor our expressions and thoughts, we perpetuate a conformist mindset that can uphold societal hegemony, making it difficult for us to challenge prevailing norms and pursue true authenticity.
In practice
During a workshop on free expression, you could use this quote to emphasize the importance of speaking out against societal norms.
some mornings... I sit at the kitchen table shaking salt into the hairs on my arm, and a feeling shoves up in me: it's finished. Everything went past without me.
I find myself thinking more about the past as I get older... maybe because there's just more of it to think about. At the same time, I'm less haunted by it than I was as a younger person. I guess that's probably the ideal: to reach a point where you have access to all of your memories, but you don't feel victimized by them.
I think, for one thing, all of us remember those teenage years and those songs that we fell in love with and the music scene that we were part of. So, in a certain way, music cuts through time like almost nothing else. You know, it makes us feel like we're back in an earlier moment.
And Alex understood that Scotty Hausmann did not exist. He was a word casing in human form: a shell whose essence has vanished.
We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There's simply no way to write well, though, if you're not reading well.
We stand there, quiet. My questions all seem wrong: How did you get so old? Was it all at once, in a day, or did you peter out bit by bit? When did you stop having parties? Did everyone else get old too, or was it just you? Are other people still here, hiding in the palm trees or holding their breath underwater? When did you last swim your laps? Do your bones hurt? Did you know this was coming and hide that you knew, or did it ambush you from behind?
The object of the Bible is not to tell how good men are, but how bad men can become good.
Racism cannot be separated from capitalism.
Our flaws are what makes us human. If we can accept them as part of who we are, they really don't even have to be an issue.
Whoever lives among many evils just as I, how can dying not be a source of gain?
My dog does not care where heat comes from, but he cares that it comes, and soon. Indeed he considers my ability to make it come as something magical, for when I rise in the coal black pre-dawn and kneel by the hearth to make a fire, he pushes himself blandly between me and the kindling splits I have laid in the ashes, and I must touch a match to them by poking it between his legs. Such faith , I suppose, is the kind that moves mountains.
He that seeks here any other thing but simply God and the salvation of his soul, will find nothing but trouble and sorrow.
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