I can't honestly account for the very personal response that I have to one story and not another, a sense of an orbit, the orbit of a world that draws me as my own life recedes.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the deep personal connection one can feel to certain stories that resonate with their own life experiences.
In this quote, Daniel Day-Lewis expresses the subjective nature of storytelling and how individual connections to narratives can vary. He notes that some stories draw him in deeply, creating a sense of belonging or personal relevance, even as he himself feels distanced from his own life. This speaks to the power of stories to evoke emotions and reflections on one’s own journey.
In practice
In a book discussion group, you might reference this quote when discussing how different readers resonate with various characters.
One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.
You don't merely give over your creativity to making a film - you give over your life! In theatre, by contrast, you live these two rather strange lives simultaneously; you have no option but to confront the mould on last night's washing-up.
When I've gone back to work, it's always with that sense of inevitability. That may be a complete delusion, but it's the one that I need to get out of bed and go about my business. That sense that I can't avoid this thing. I better just get on with it.
I suppose it's a very highly developed form of denial, but some part of me completely denies that I'm a performer.
I don't torture myself. And I do the work because of the pleasure involved. I'm satisfying a compulsion I find nigh-on irresistible. It's not necessarily because of the work itself. I just feel the need for a period of regeneration afterwards. Like leaving a field fallow when you've grazed too much on it. I feel depleted.
England is obsessed with where you came from, and they are determined to keep you in that place, be it in a drawing room or in the gutter.
No system of regulation can safely be substituted for the operation of individual liberty as expressed in competition.
The continual looking forward to the eternal world is not a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do.
As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.
Man's nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.
It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.
The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project
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