When writing loses touch with the beautiful surface of the world, it loses its way. You always want to be in touch with how things look and what people say and what they call their dogs.
Garrison KeillorRead
Even in a time of elephantine vanity and greed, one never has to look far to see the campfires of gentle people.
Interpretation
What this quote means
There is always kindness and goodness to be found, even amidst a world filled with arrogance and greed.
Garrison Keillor's quote suggests that despite the overwhelming presence of pride and materialism in society, one can still find hope and goodness in the actions of compassionate individuals. The imagery of 'campfires of gentle people' evokes a sense of warmth and community, indicating that acts of kindness, though possibly overshadowed, remain a vital and observable part of human experience.
Themes
KindnessCommunityCompassionVanityGreed
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech about social responsibility and community service, one might use this quote to highlight the importance of kindness.
More from Garrison Keillor
All quotes βTravel is the art form available to Everyman. You sit in the coffee shop in a strange city and nobody knows who you are, or cares, and so you shed your checkered past and your motley credentials and you face the day unarmed ... And onward we go and some day in the distant future, we will stop and turn around in astonishment to see all the places we've been and the heroes we were.
Garrison KeillorRead
Thank you, dear God, for this good life and forgive us if we do not love it enough. Thank you for the rain. And for the chance to wake up in three hours and go fishing: I thank you for that now, because I won't feel so thankful then.
Garrison KeillorRead
I have taken so many wrong turns and been so careless with precious things and managed to lose, or break, or leave out in the rain so much that I loved.
Garrison KeillorRead
When you wage war on the public schools, you're attacking the mortar that holds the community together. You're not a conservative, you're a vandal.
Garrison KeillorRead
It's a shallow life that doesn't give a person a few scars.
Garrison KeillorRead
Similar quotes
It is necessary to remember, as we think critically about domination, that we all have the capacity to act in ways that oppress, dominate, wound (whether or not that power is institutionalized). It is necessary to remember that it is first the potential oppressor within that we must resist β the potential victim within that we must rescue β otherwise we cannot hope for an end to domination, for liberation.
Bell HooksRead
When explorers first encountered my people, they called us heathens, sun worshippers. They didn't understand that the sun is a relative and illuminates our path on this earth.
Joy HarjoRead
I realised that the idea of enforcing sharia is not consistent with Islam as it's been practised from the beginning. In other words, Islam has always been secular, and I had been totally ignorant of the fact.
Maajid NawazRead
You know Balbec so well - do you have friends in the area?' I have friends wherever there are companies of trees, wounded but not vanquished, which huddle together with touching obstinacy to implore an inclement and pitiless sky.' That is not what I meant,' interrupted my father, as obstinate as the trees and as pitiless as the sky.
Marcel ProustRead
We do not see people as they are, but as they appear to us. And these appearances are usually misleading.
Robert GreeneRead
Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that you toast in champagne. On the contrary, it's hard graft and a long-distance run, all alone, very exhausting. Alone in a dreary room, alone in the dock before the judges, and alone to make up your mind, before yourself and before the judgement of others. At the end of every freedom there is a sentence, which is why freedom is too heavy to bear.
Albert CamusRead