Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal.
Interpretation
Life can seem strange from one angle, but a shift in perspective reveals its normalcy.
In this quote, Jonathan Franzen reflects on the nature of perception in life. He suggests that our experiences can initially appear odd or bewildering when viewed from a certain standpoint. However, with a slight change in perspective, what once seemed unusual can become understandable or 'normal.' This highlights the importance of flexibility in how we interpret our lives and the world around us.
In practice
Use this quote in a discussion about how to approach challenging life situations.
Every good writer I know needs to go into some deep, quiet place to do work that is fully imagined. And what the Internet brings is lots of vulgar data. It is the antithesis of the imagination. It leaves nothing to the imagination.
The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn't covetous, he wasn't envious. But without money he was hardly a man.
Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive's sake.
If multiculturalism succeeds in making us a nation of independently empowered tribes, each tribe will be deprived of the comfort of victimhood and be forced to confront human limitation for what it is: a fixture of life.
To read is to have experiences; every book changes my life at least a little bit. The first time I can remember this happening was when I was 10, with a biography of Thomas Edison.
Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.
I remember myself, age five, sitting on a porch overlooking a very muddy road. The day was rainy. I was wearing rubber boots, yellow - no, not yellow, green - and for all I know, I'm still there.
The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom.
How many times have you tried to solve “the problem”? you’ll be trying to solve it not just until you die but for many more lifetimes. Instead, understand that this world is just the play of the senses. It’s the five khandhas doing their thing; it has nothing to do with you. It’s just people being people, the world being the world.
Men shrink less from offending one who inspires love than one who inspires fear.
Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.
People into hard sciences, neurophysiology, often ignore a core philosophical question: 'What is the relationship between our unique, inner experience of conscious awareness and material substance?' The answer is: We don't know, and some people are so terrified to say, 'I don't know.'
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