Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Dreams are beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk awhile with the still-are.
David MitchellRead
When you're out of your own cultural context you have conversations with yourself that you just don't have at any other point in your life. When you're in a hotel room on the border between India and Nepal you can really discover things about yourself.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Being away from familiar surroundings prompts deep self-reflection and personal discovery.
David Mitchell's quote emphasizes how stepping outside of our cultural contexts can lead to profound introspection and revelations about ourselves. When we are in unfamiliar environments, such as a hotel room on the border between two countries, we find ourselves having conversations and reflections that we wouldn't typically engage in within our everyday lives, allowing for unique insights into our identity and existence.
Themes
Cultural ContextSelf-DiscoveryIntrospectionTravelPersonal Growth
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about personal growth during a seminar, one might quote this to illustrate the value of travel.
More from David Mitchell
All quotes →The Revelation of Sonmi 451 To be is to be perceived, and so to know thyself is only possible through the eyes of the other. The nature of our immortal lives is in the consequences of our words and deeds, that go on and are pushing themselves throughout all time. - Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.
David MitchellRead
…and there, in the background, the sky’s sediment had sunk to a place where all the woe of the words ‘I am’ dissolved into blue peace. He said it. ‘The ocean.
David MitchellRead
How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner.
David MitchellRead
. . .my dreams are the single unpredictable factor in my zoned days and nights. Nobody allots them, or censors them. Dreams are all I have ever truly owned.
David MitchellRead
My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?
David MitchellRead
Similar quotes
Talk to me about sadness. I talk about it too much in my own head but I never mind others talking about it either; I occasionally feel like I tremendously need others to talk about it as well.
Anne SextonRead
The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years.
Steven PinkerRead
It is the basic principle of spiritual life that we learn the deepest things in unknown territory. Often it is when we feel most confused inwardly and are in the midst of our greatest difficulties that something new will open. We awaken most easily to the mystery of life through our weakest side. The areas of our greatest strength, where we are the most competent and clearest, tend to keep us away from the mystery.
Jack KornfieldRead
This is the curse of our age, even the strangest aberrations are no cure for boredom.
StendhalRead
the voice of beauty speaks softly; it creeps only into the most fully awakened souls
Friedrich NietzscheRead
From a religious point of view, if God had thought homosexuality is a sin, he would not have created gay people.
Howard DeanRead