I read for growth, firmly believing that what you are today and what you will be in five years depends on two things: the people you meet and the books you read.
Interpretation
Personal growth is influenced by the connections you make and the knowledge you acquire.
This quote emphasizes the importance of both relationships and literature in shaping an individual's future. Twyla Tharp suggests that the people we surround ourselves with and the books we choose to read significantly contribute to our development and success over time, indicating that growth is not just a personal endeavor but also a communal one, heavily influenced by external sources of wisdom and inspiration.
In practice
In a motivational speech about self-improvement, you could quote this to emphasize the importance of surrounding oneself with positive influences.
Do I watch dancers as people? Yes, absolutely. Do I watch really good dancers for specifically who they are? Absolutely, because how they move best and how they look best is going to be most familiar to them, and not necessarily to me.
I am still pushing the edge of what my body can do.
No one is born with skill. It is developed through exercise, through repetition, through a blend of learning and reflection that's both painstaking and rewarding. And it takes time.
Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.
I grew up in a drive-in theater, from the time I was 8, working in a snack bar watching four features every week. It was silent theater in the sense that this was a drive-in, which meant that I often saw the films going with no sound. But I learned to tell stories through action.
Without passion, all the skill in the world won't lift you above craft.
And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.
Nothing is more common than for men to think that because they are familiar with words they understand the ideas they stand for.
I train my chefs completely different to anyone else. My young girls and guys, when they come to the kitchen, the first thing they get is a blindfold. They get blindfolded and they get sat down at the chef's table... Unless they can identify what they're tasting, they don't get to cook it.
The academic bias against subjectivity not only forces our students to write poorly ("It is believed...," instead of, "I believe..."), it deforms their thinking about themselves and their world. In a single stroke, we delude our students into believing that bad prose turns opinions into facts and we alienate them from their own inner lives.
An academic discipline, or any other semiotic domain, for that matter, is not primarily content, in the sense of facts and principles. It is rather primarily a lived and historically changing set of distinctive social practices. It is in these practices that 'content' is generated, debated, and transformed via certain distinctive ways of thinking, talking, valuing, acting, and, often, writing and reading.
We have an education and business culture that tends to reward quick factual answers over imaginative inquiry. Questioning isn’t encouraged - it is barely tolerated.
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