I knew that the world around you is only uninteresting if you can't see what is really going on. The place you come from is always the most exotic place you'll ever encounter because it is the only place where you recognise how many secrets and mysteries there are in people's lives
Interpretation
The world holds endless fascination if you choose to look beyond the surface of ordinary life.
This quote by David Malouf emphasizes that our surroundings can seem dull only if we fail to appreciate the depth and complexity of life around us. It suggests that the most familiar places can be the most intriguing because they are filled with untold stories, secrets, and mysteries waiting to be discovered, urging us to observe and engage more deeply with our environment and the people in it.
In practice
In a speech about appreciating local cultures, one could use this quote to highlight the beauty of familiarity.
Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.
For as men in battle are continually in the way of shot, so we, in this world, are ever within the reach of Temptation.
The entire political system is contrary to everything a feminine heart stands for. It lacks inclusion. It lacks tenderness toward children. It lacks honor for relationships. It lacks reverence for the earth. It lacks love. And without those things, the feminine psyche disconnects.
Pride only, the chief of all iniquities, can make us treat gifts as if they were rightful attributes of our nature, and, while receiving benefits, rob our Benefactor of His due glory.
I say people who feel they must have a faith or religion in order to face life are showing a kind of cowardice, which in any other sphere would be considered contemptible. But when it is in the religious sphere it is thought admirable, and I cannot admire cowardice whatever sphere it is in.
After Hiroshima was bombed, I saw a photograph of the side of a house with the shadows of the people who had lived there burned into the wall from the intensity of the bomb. The people were gone, but their shadows remained.
After every war someone has to tidy up.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.