Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience--buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello--become new all over again.
Interpretation
Stepping out of your comfort zone allows you to rediscover everyday experiences with fresh eyes.
This quote emphasizes the importance of breaking free from routine and familiar surroundings to gain a new perspective on life. By leaving home and venturing into the unknown, mundane activities can take on new significance, leading to personal growth and heightened awareness of the world around us.
In practice
During a motivational speech about embracing new experiences.
The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we're not careful, pretty soon we're gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack.
Anyone who has spent a few nights in a tent during a storm can tell you: The world doesn't care all that much if you live or die.
I used to think...that I had to be careful with how much I lived. As if life was a pocketful of coins. You only got so much and you didn't want to spend it all in one place...But now I know that life is the one thing in the world that never runs out. I might run out of mine, and you might run out of yours, but the world will never run out of life. And we're all very lucky to be part of something like that.
I don't believe in reincarnation. I feel like we're here for such an appallingly brief period of time. I believe we each get this one trip, and if we're really, really fortunate, maybe we get 70 or 80 years on Earth.
My sister-in-law is a painter, and I'll say, how long did it take you to paint that painting. She'll say, It took me maybe three days, but it took me all my life to get the skills to paint that painting.
The preciousness of life and the changes of weather and the beauty of seasons - all those things have always sort of dazzled me.
A man must shape himself to a new mark directly the old one goes to ground.
We must make progress slowly so as to preserve the progress we have already made.
President Kennedy has named two Negroes to District Judgeships and appointed Thurgood Marshall to the United States Court of Appeals. When I came to the Department of Justice, there were only ten Negroes employed as lawyers; not a single Negro served as a United States Attorney - or ever had in the history of the country. That has been changed.
For the sake of our security, our economy and our planet, we must have the courage and commitment to change.
No matter what mistakes we might have made yesterday, today is the day we can retrieve our innocence.
Change is the principal feature of our age and literature should explore how people deal with it. The best science fiction does that, head-on.
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