I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the surprising realization of one's value in an unfamiliar and challenging situation.
Alice Munro's quote captures the profound experience of being taken away from familiar surroundings, leading to a revelation of self-worth that is detached from one's previous identity or circumstances. It suggests that in situations of captivity or dislocation, individuals may discover aspects of themselves and their value that they had previously overlooked or taken for granted, highlighting the complexities of identity and value in human experience.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a discussion on personal growth in unexpected situations.
Sometimes our connection is frayed, it is in danger, it seems almost lost. Views and streets deny knowledge of us, the air grows thin. Wouldn't we rather have a destiny to submit to, than, something that claims us, anything, instead of such flimsy choices, arbitrary days?
Anecdotes don't make good stories. Generally I dig down underneath them so far that the story that finally comes out is not what people thought their anecdotes were about.
I just believed it easily, the way you might believe and in fact remember that you once had another set of teeth, now vanished but real in spite of that. Until one day, one day when I may even have been in my teens, I knew with a dim sort of hole in my insides that now I didn't believe it anymore.
You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.
A story is not like a road to follow... it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside it altered by being viewed from these windows.
It's certainly true that when I was young, writing seemed to me so important that I would have sacrificed almost anything to it ... Because I thought of the world in which I wrote -- the world I created -- as somehow much more enormously alive than the world I was actually living in.
Man... knows only when he is satisfied and when he suffers, and only his sufferings and his satisfactions instruct him concerning himself, teach him what to seek and what to avoid. For the rest, man is a confused creature; he knows not whence he comes or whither he goes, he knows little of the world, and above all, he knows little of himself.
If eternity had a season, it would be midsummer. Autumn, winter, spring are all change and passage, but at the height of summer the year stands poised. It's only a passing moment, but even as it passes the heart knows it cannot change.
The love of power, like the love of money, increases with the possession of it; and we know in what ruin these baneful passions have involved human societies in all ages when they have been let loose and suffered to rage uncontrolled - There is no restraint like the pervading eye of the virtuous citizens.
The mind of man is a thousand times more beautiful than the earth on which he dwells.
I don't believe in God but I'm very interested in her.
I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.
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