Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that every experience has both an internal perception and an external reality, each uniquely significant.
Zadie Smith's quote reflects on the nature of our experiences, highlighting the duality of how events are perceived internally and how they occur in the external world. This distinction underlines the complexity of human experience, indicating that our personal histories and the events that unfold in the world are intertwined yet distinct, shaping our understanding of reality in different ways.
In practice
In a discussion about subjective experiences in a psychology class, this quote can resonate.
Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - it's something to do with that experience of moving from West to East or East to West or from island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round. There's no proper term for it - original sin seems too harsh; maybe original trauma would be better.
You know, you don't expect everyone to be as educated as everyone else or have the same achievements, but you expect at least to be offered at least some of the opportunities, and libraries are the most simple and the most open way to give people access to books.
He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.
We cannot be all the writers all the time. We can only be who we are. Which leads me to my second point: writers do not write what they want, they write what they can.
I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.
I never attended a creative writing class in my life. I have a horror of them.
Being precedes Truth, and ... Truth precedes the Good.
You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.
There are hidden contradictions in the minds of people who "love Nature" while deploring the "artificialities" with which "Man has spoiled Nature.'" The obvious contradiction lies in their choice of words, which imply that Man and his artifacts are not part of "Nature" : but beavers and their dams are.
I was tired and crazy and rushed, and every time I boarded a plane, I wanted the plane to crash. I envied people dying of cancer. I hated my life. I was tired and bored with my job and my furniture, and I couldnβt see any way to change things. Only end them.
There are the saints of every day, the 'hidden' saints, a sort of 'middle class of holiness'... to which we can all belong.
It ill becomes us to invoke in our daily prayers the blessings of God, the Compassionate, if we in turn will not practice elementary compassion toward our fellow creatures.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.