“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
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―
“The Camino points to something more fundamental, to a way of thinking about self and others that looks inward past window-dressing and the usual social identifiers. Pilgrims leave behind professional and social tags when they enter the Camino. Here we're fellow human beings. Period. Often I know only the first name and nationality of people I meet on the trail, sometimes not even that, and with our standard pilgrim attire, we don't offer the usual visual cues to who we are and what we do in life. Yet we affect each other in profound ways. On this level playing field, we talk easily about whatever is on our minds, and the insights from strangers can be surprisingly perceptive. The French pilgrim at Compostelle 2000 (the Paris pilgrim association) was on to something when she told me that the Camino is more than a physical place. It does present breathtaking encounters with the land itself, but it also pushes me to look beyond the physical world.”
― Steps Out of Time: One Woman's Journey on the Camino
― Steps Out of Time: One Woman's Journey on the Camino
“Grammar is a piano I play by ear.”
― Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations
― Joan Didion: Essays & Conversations
“7 The world that we have to deal with politically is out of reach, out of sight, out of mind. It has to be explored, reported, and imagined. Man is no Aristotelian god contemplating all existence at one glance. He is the creature of an evolution who can just about span a sufficient portion of reality to manage his survival, and snatch what on the scale of time are but a few moments of insight and happiness. Yet this same creature has invented ways of seeing what no naked eye could see, of hearing what no ear could hear, of weighing immense masses and infinitesimal ones, of counting and separating more items than he can individually remember. He is learning to see with his mind vast portions of the world that he could never see, touch, smell, hear, or remember. Gradually he makes for himself a trustworthy picture inside his head of the world beyond his reach.”
― Public Opinion: Enriched edition. Uncovering the Influence of Media on Societal Beliefs and Democratic Discourse
― Public Opinion: Enriched edition. Uncovering the Influence of Media on Societal Beliefs and Democratic Discourse
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