Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the indifference of the world towards individual existence, especially in the face of nature's power.
Anthony Doerr's quote serves as a stark reminder of the vastness and indifference of the world around us. When faced with the raw forces of nature, such as a storm, one can realize that life is fragile and that the world does not inherently value individual existence. This perspective can lead to a deeper understanding of our place in the universe and motivate us to appreciate life's moments more intensely.
In practice
In a discussion about resilience, one might quote this to emphasize the importance of realizing life's fragility.
The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we're not careful, pretty soon we're gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack.
I used to think...that I had to be careful with how much I lived. As if life was a pocketful of coins. You only got so much and you didn't want to spend it all in one place...But now I know that life is the one thing in the world that never runs out. I might run out of mine, and you might run out of yours, but the world will never run out of life. And we're all very lucky to be part of something like that.
Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience--buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello--become new all over again.
I don't believe in reincarnation. I feel like we're here for such an appallingly brief period of time. I believe we each get this one trip, and if we're really, really fortunate, maybe we get 70 or 80 years on Earth.
My sister-in-law is a painter, and I'll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She'll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me all my life to get the skills to paint that painting.
The preciousness of life and the changes of weather and the beauty of seasons - all those things have always sort of dazzled me.
I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered. You might as well try and catch time by the tail.
I'm afraid that in the United States of America today the prevailing doctrine of justification is not justification by faith alone. It is not even justification by good works or by a combination of faith and works. The prevailing notion of justification in our culture today is justification by death. All one has to do to be received into the everlasting arms of God is to die.
Revolutionaries see history as a creation of their own spirit, as being made up of a continuous series of violent tugs at the other forces of society - both active and passive, and they prepare the maximum of favourable conditions for the definitive tug (revolution).
Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.
To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.
God only rarely reveals the future. When he does so, it is for one reason: it's a future that was written so as to be altered.
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