Understanding Quotes - Page 34

• I guess I've always had such an identity crisis when it comes to other people's understanding of me. I don't feel it in myself but from an outsider's point of view, I can see they must be thinking, "Who the hell does this guy think he is?" But recently I've been thinking, okay, a white guy can't sing soul, but would a black person be made exempt from singing opera because it's not a tradition that belongs to them? It's the same kind of argument.

  Jamie Lidell

  Thinking, Guy, Soul

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• I was working within a figurative representational framework, and there was a sense of reading the painting as a transparency, or truth, or autobiography, which I think is partially the burden of artists of color - or women, or anybody who is representing a so-called minority position. Are you actually telling a true story, or your own story? You don't just get to tell a story. The readings of the work didn't necessarily conform to my own understanding of mythology, where violence and eroticism and the body and all of these different forms coexist all the time.

  Chitra Ganesh

  Reading, Artist, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I think in America, especially today, our relationship to war is incredible distant. Yet narratives of war have such a primal power in this culture. They mainline directly into a whole series of emotional reactions and understandings of American patriotism, masculinity, and all of these other things.

  Phil Klay

  War, Emotional, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I got interested in the contradiction between people who are understanding the city by not moving a single inch, by remaining in the same place all the time, and people like me who are constantly roaming around.

  Iain Sinclair

  Moving, People, Contradiction

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• What I realized is that if we're going to be able to have a theory about what happens in, for example, nature there has to ultimately be some rule by which nature operates. But the issue is does that rule have to correspond to something like a mathematical equation, something that we have sort of created in our human mathematics? And what I realized is that now with our understanding of computation and computer programs and so on, there is actually a much bigger universe of possible rules to describe the natural world than just the mathematical equation kinds of things.

  Stephen Wolfram

  World, Kind, Computer

  Source: bigthink.com

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• If you can imagine the story of the world as a giant movie, to not have some understanding of the Bible - its story, its history, and its impact - would be like watching a great movie and removing part of the plot. It can't be done. The real truth is that everyone regardless of faith tradition benefits from knowing and understanding these aspects of the Bible. It enhances one's knowledge of literature, science, art etc. It's difficult to read any classic work of literature for instance and not see biblical allusions.

  Steve Green

  Art, Real, Biblical

  Source: www.biblegateway.com

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• Conversation with animals could happen, but I think it would be easier for it to happen with creatures we share a bit more with - those that have been bred to interact with us, like dogs or horses, or ones to whom we have a natural evolutionary link, like chimps and other nonhuman apes. I mean, we do communicate with dolphins and whales, but we're not trying to get to the depths of their understandings. I feel that with animals as different from us as the whales and dolphins, it's likely to work better with us just watching them and trying to figure them out.

  Hal Whitehead

  Dog, Horse, Mean

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• We don't have a hundred years to fix climate change. We don't have a hundred years to wait until we've built all these bridges and rapport and scientific understanding and so on and so forth. We have to fix climate change with the people we have right now, and to a large extent with the perspectives we have right now as well.

  Katharine Hayhoe

  People, Perspective, Waiting

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• All the time I was plowing through books on dyslexia, I found myself asking: what if, what if? What if you were a kid the 1950s with this condition, when there were no books on it, when there was no understanding of it. I remember kids in my class at school who just didn't seem to progress in their reading. There was no extra help. People just thought, "Oh, he or she isn't so bright, or they're obstinate."

  Maggie O'Farrell

  Book, Reading, School

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I'm more interested than Philip Roth in understanding women, even if I do it imperfectly. But that book, Portnoy's Complaint, is literary punk in this way that is rare.

  Karan Mahajan

  Book, Punk, Philip

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Generally, the technology that enables disruption is developed in the companies that are the practitioners of the original technology. That's where the understanding of the technology first comes together. They usually can't commercialize the technology because they have to couple it with the business model innovation, and because they tend to try to take all of their technologies to market through their original business model, somebody else just picks up the technology and changes the world through the business model innovation.

  Clayton Christensen

  Couple, Technology, Innovation

  Source: bigthink.com

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• One of the reasons people might be fallible, why we might fail to do what we try to do isignorance, that we have a limited understanding of the laws of the world - the physical laws that govern the world and of all the particulars of the world upon which those laws work. And then there's ineptitude, meaning that the knowledge is available, but individuals fail to apply it correctly. The third source is "necessary fallibility." That is, we're never going to be omniscient, there is some knowledge that we will simply never achieve, and there are limits to what we will be able to do.

  Atul Gawande

  People, Trying, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I would say the only one person I know of who kind of combines the elements that my father brought to the table in terms of affecting the public discourse would be Oliver Stone. His combination of academic brilliance and real life experience and just understanding people I think is what makes him such a great storyteller, but also he cares. He is interested. He meets somebody and he listens to them. He has some questions. He wants to know what they're about. And as a result I think his worldview is much more complex and whole and most of the other.

  John Buffalo Mailer

  Father, Real, Thinking

  Source: bigthink.com

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• It's true, there aren't many explicit references to Canada in my book. And not many explicit references to the U.S., either. I try to fill my poems with enough real, observed detail that the poems create a believable world - but I don't write poems for the sake of telling my own story. My life is not important or interesting enough to warrant that kind of documentary. Instead I try to use my experience as a way of understanding situations that are common to many people. I want readers to project their own lives onto my poems.

  James Arthur

  Real, Book, Writing

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I do like Canadian poetry. Christian Bök, Anne Carson, Carmine Starnino, and Don McKay are a few of the Canadian poets whose work has been important to me. But I'm not sure that I do see poetry as a world apart. Some of my metaphors are based in the fantastic, but I try to be true to life as I understand it. That understanding is affected by my Canadianness, my Americanness, my whiteness, my gender, my age, my education, my experience...everything about me affects my view of reality. But I try to wrestle against those partialities, not embrace them.

  James Arthur

  Christian, Reality, True Life

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I want to reiterate that my understanding of the poem is not the poem's core, true meaning. Once a poem goes out into the world, the poet is just one more reader.

  James Arthur

  World, Poet

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I think normative or binary lenses for seeing bodies often crush or delegitimize other felt physical experiences of being and desiring. I've found that such inadequate ways of understanding bodies can be - but aren't always - based on biological perspectives.

  Jenny Johnson

  Crush, Thinking, Perspective

  Source: therumpus.net

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• More platform-sensitive generations will make distinctions between online and in-person intimacy, whereas fourteen-year-olds have very nuanced online selves and might embody their virtual identity in the physical, analogue version of themselves. They have a much more pluralistic understanding of the self. I don't think we'd be here now in this amazing sexual and gender revolution without the online space where young people can see and share other versions of identity and sexuality.

  Charlotte Cotton

  Thinking, People, Identity

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I think that dogs accept that they can live together and not understand one another, and I think that we somehow always try to have a complete and transparent understanding of one another, which just leads to more confusion.

  Toby Barlow

  Dog, Thinking, Confusion

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• It's astonishing how quickly cultural references change. Each new generation of parents grows up with a new slate of cultural understanding, television shows, and unique parental issues. The biblical principles remain the same, however, so this was a slight reworking, not a major overhaul.

  Gary L. Thomas

  Growing Up, Biblical, Unique

  Source: www.biblegateway.com

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• We all come from someplace. We didn't just get here by accident. Where we come from has got to be known, if you want to know where you are and who you are. You cannot understand the present without understanding the past, especially when it comes to family.

  Edward James Olmos

  Past, Who You Are

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• I think as much as the city is changing us, our experience inside the city also changes. I think, a city like Cairo - and it's interesting because yesterday, a friend of mine told me the same this thing about New York - is a city that you can't control. It's very bold and very aggressive, and it will constantly resist any attempt at control. But even though you can't control it, you can find your path within the city. You can come to a better understanding of your relationship with it.

  Tamer El Said

  Thinking, Interesting, Path

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• There is the specter of "realism" that is still haunting Chinese contemporary art - that art is only an instrument, an instrument to reflect society, that it must be useful for society. Also, I have noticed many Western media outlets are very insistent on understanding contemporary art in China through this kind of realist approach. Sometimes I even sense that they are intent on, as we say in China, "picking bones of politics out of an egg of art." Or perhaps they see art as merely an instrument to reflect society.

  Wang Jianwei

  Art, Chinese, Kind

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• From about age 17 to 25, a time some people describe as "beautiful youth," it was "arranged" for me to live with two different collectives. These eight years where I had absolutely no choice influenced me in two ways: firstly, I gained an understanding of "freedom." To this day, I very much respect and treasure individual choice. Secondly, I developed a suspicion towards any kind of organization, collective, movement or uniform action, as well as a rejection of any kind of power.

  Wang Jianwei

  Beautiful, People, Choices

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I am sympathetic to the kind of faith that does not evangelize or raise banners but is the faith drawn on by a lone human being as a means of support or as an organizing principle or even as mere practice. It is faith that is born of humility and an understanding of one's own frailty. I can recognize it because I have met many people who exhibit this kind of faith.

  Zia Haider Rahman

  Mean, Humility, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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