The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
Don DelilloRead
I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living space writing these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections, finding some honor, some worth at the bottom of things. I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a deep sense of shame and the desire for redemption through the act of writing.
In this quote, Don DeLillo articulates a struggle with personal shame and a quest for meaning and honor through the written word. He emphasizes the cathartic power of journaling as a means to confront his internal conflicts, seeking to produce something profound that can resonate with the world, even amidst feelings of inadequacy.
In practice
During a workshop on personal growth, one might quote this to emphasize the power of journaling.
The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.
American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.
For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.
I used to think it was possible for an artist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.
[I]n the American soul there is a lonely individual standing in a vast landscape. He is either on a horse or driving a car, depending, and either way he’s carrying a gun. This is one of the essential images in American mythology.
It's your life - but only if you make it so. The standards by which you live must be your own standards, your own values, your own convictions in regard to what is right and wrong, what is true and false, what is important and what is trivial. When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else . . . you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.
What is character? It is that quality of man which is going to make a man, in an hour of strain, do the just and, if possible, the generous thing.
Man's ideal state is realized when he has fulfilled the purpose for which he is born. And what is it that reason demands of him? Something very easy-that he live in accordance with his own nature.
You are so accustomed to think of yourselves as bodies having consciousness that you just cannot imagine consciousness as having bodies. Once you realize that bodily existence is but a state of mind, a movement in consciousness, that the ocean of consciousness is infinite and eternal, and that, when in touch with consciousness, you are the witness only, you will be able to withdraw beyond consciousness altogether.
How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not had a seedtime of character?
The course of a river is almost always disapproved of by the source.
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