"We all live rather prescribed and narrow lives. I’m just this one white guy, 60-something years old. I’ll never be anything else except older. I’ve got one set of kids. I’ve got one wife. That’s it for me. But then there’s this great, great library of experiences that’s housed in the liberal arts. Fictional worlds created that I can put on like this gown or coat, eyes I can borrow through which to see the world. I can be a black housewife. I can be a king. I can be a 19th-century fur trapper. I can be a C.I.A. spy. I can be a warrior. I can learn what it feels like to be tried and convicted, to confess, to win the beautiful girl, lose the beautiful girl. It’s a way of understanding the world that functions beyond intellect and it teaches and touches through feeling and experience even when the experience is purely that of the imagination. Compassion finally is the great gift of literature. Fiction, and by that I mean the aesthetic creation of all artificial worlds, must persuade you to interpret the world through compassion."
- Sydney Pollack (1934-2008)
1 comment:
"I'll never be anything else except older."
I've always wondered how an atheist can be an optimist. Answer: by distracting himself, and even then, he's still a pessimist.
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