QuoteProject
As a writer, I tend to be drawn to marginal people - writers, poet-prophets, seers, eccentrics - who embody the deeper ambivalences of their societies and bear deeper witness to their world than the famous figures we are used to celebrating, or demonizing, in our histories.
Pankaj Mishra
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote emphasizes the value of marginalized voices in literature and society who often reveal deeper truths.

Pankaj Mishra highlights the significance of writers and other creative individuals who, often overlooked or pushed to the margins, possess unique insights into the complexities and contradictions of their societies. Rather than focusing solely on prominent figures celebrated in history, the quote invites us to pay attention to those who capture the nuanced realities and struggles of the human experience, giving them a voice and honoring their contributions to our understanding of the world.

Themes

MarginalizedVoicesSocietyWritersTruthInsight

In practice

Example use cases

This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of diversity in literature and the arts.

More from Pankaj Mishra

It turns out that globalisation, while promising sameness through brand-name consumption, was fostering, through uneven economic growth, an intense feeling of difference.
Pankaj MishraRead
Governments everywhere that are unable to guarantee equitable growth and social welfare have suffered a fatal decay of legitimacy.
Pankaj MishraRead
Minorities within nation-states frayed by global capitalism are naturally more resentful of hollowed-out but still heavily centralised systems of political and economic domination.
Pankaj MishraRead
The onslaught of new and complex information, the academic and thinktank cults of expertise, not to mention the impossibility of bohemia in the age of high rents, have conspired to assassinate the public intellectual.
Pankaj MishraRead
The advocates of retaliatory wars will continue to assume a much simpler reality with their hoary oppositions: Religious and secular, backward and enlightened, free and unfree. But if we are to admit how deeply and irrevocably interconnected our world is, then we must find new ways to break the cycle of counter-productive violence.
Pankaj MishraRead
Economic disasters or foolish wars are hardly guaranteed to bring about large-scale individual self-examination or renew the appeal of truly participatory democracy.
Pankaj MishraRead

Similar quotes

An incurable itch for scribbling takes possession of many, and grows inveterate in their insane breasts.
JuvenalRead
When you say 'design,' everybody thinks of magazine pages. So it's an emotive word. Everybody thinks it's how something looks, whereas for me, design is pretty much everything.
James DysonRead
Noncooks think it's silly to invest two hours' work in two minutes' enjoyment; but if cooking is evanescent, so is the ballet.
Julia ChildRead
We, as film-makers, are privileged. We can make people cry or laugh. We can make them think and feel. It is a great privilege and a great responsibility.
Haskell WexlerRead
I always had an eye toward the stage for the story of Hamilton's life, but I began with the idea of a concept album, the way Andrew Lloyd Webber's 'Evita' and 'Jesus Christ Superstar' were albums before they were musicals.
Lin-Manuel MirandaRead
Nowhere in the job description of an artist is the requirement that I must validate your taste.
James TurrellRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.