Storytellers all, we humans might run out of time even as we triumph over the problem of running out of space. But we will never run out of stories.
Interpretation
Humans will always create and share stories, regardless of the constraints of time and space.
In this quote, Tom Junod expresses the enduring nature of storytelling, suggesting that even as we face the limitations of time and the physical vastness of space, our capacity for creating and sharing stories remains limitless. Stories are fundamental to the human experience, serving as a means of connection and understanding that transcends our temporal and spatial boundaries.
In practice
During a writing workshop, to inspire participants about the importance of storytelling.
It is insufficient to say that my experience as a bully haunts me. Rather, my experience as a bully has been fundamental to the creation of my conscience, because it is what prevents me from making the basic human claim that I am a good person.
By turning our culture over to the spectacle of child stars and their growing pains, we simply wind up taking their childishness seriously and ensuring that they don't grow up at all. And neither do we.
That's the first thing you learn when you busk in the New York City subways: you immediately join the ranks of the marginalized, the unhinged prophets, the Christian shouters, the Hare Krishnas, the Jehovah's witnesses, the father-and-daughter kitaro team, the violinists playing for their sickly wives.
Cooking is, to me, the perfect fusion of generosity and selfishness, indeed the resolution of generosity and selfishness, the answer to my torn nature.
I cook so that there is no absence. I cook so that I am always there, even when I'm gone, even when I die, and my cooking translates in my daughter's memory as, simply, this: time.
The premise and promise of Big Data is that there are no stories, only patterns; that the human preference for story is aligned with the human tendency for error; and that only through dislocations in scale - the scale of sample size and of time - will truth emerge.
It's easy to show terrible people's behavior on screen, and we all just kind of nod and go, 'Isn't that terrible.' It's more interesting when you can show terrible behavior in the interest of something good.
I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.
Variety is more than a means of avoiding boredom, since art is more than an entertainment of the senses.
I see things with my own eyes, just as if they were the first eyes that ever saw, and then I set about to tell, as best I can, just what I've seen.
White... is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.
Work is what you do for others, liebchen. Art is what you do for yourself.
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