I knew that the world around you is only uninteresting if you can't see what is really going on. The place you come from is always the most exotic place you'll ever encounter because it is the only place where you recognise how many secrets and mysteries there are in people's lives
Interpretation
The world holds endless fascination if you choose to look beyond the surface of ordinary life.
This quote by David Malouf emphasizes that our surroundings can seem dull only if we fail to appreciate the depth and complexity of life around us. It suggests that the most familiar places can be the most intriguing because they are filled with untold stories, secrets, and mysteries waiting to be discovered, urging us to observe and engage more deeply with our environment and the people in it.
In practice
In a speech about appreciating local cultures, one could use this quote to highlight the beauty of familiarity.
Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.
War is not a life: it is a situation, one which may neither be ignored nor accepted.
The tourist transports his own values and demands to his destinations and implants them like an infectious disease, decimating whatever values existed before.
The Divine realm extends to the earthly; but the later, illusory in nature, does not contain the essence of Reality.
You can find shame in every house, burning in an ashtray, hanging framed upon a wall, covering a bed. But nobody notices it any more.
So utterly at variance is Destiny with all the little plans of men.
To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart. At what age of the Christian church this heresy of immaterialism, this masked atheism, crept in, I do not know. But heresy it certainly is.
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