I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I'm gone which would not have happened if I had not come.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the interconnectedness of all experiences and the impact individuals have on one another.
Salman Rushdie highlights the profound effect that every individual's life experiences have on shaping not only their own identity but also the larger tapestry of humanity. He suggests that we are all products of our past interactions and the ripple effects of our existence continue to influence the world long after we are gone, showcasing the intertwining of lives and the importance of every individual's contribution to the collective human experience.
In practice
In a talk about personal growth and community impact, this quote can illustrate how individual experiences shape society.
I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
faith without doubt is addiction
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
What’s hard about being on the other side of the world is that sometimes the problem feels so big that changing one life doesn’t feel like enough. But it is.
I had forgotten: this is what it feels like to live in time. The lurching forward, the sensation of falling of a cliff into darkness, and then landing abruptly, surprised, confused, and then starting the whole process again in the next moment, doing that over and over again, falling into each instant of time and then climbing back up only to repeat the process.
Every new baby is a blind desperate vote for survival: people who find themselves unable to register an effective political protest against extermination do so by a biological act.
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
There is no detachment where there is no pain. And there is no pain endured without hatred or lying unless detachment is present too.
He works in us and with us, not against us or without us; so that his assistance is an encouragement to the facilitating of the work, and no occasion of neglect as to the work itself.
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