A Quote by Jeff Vandermeer

When we wake, it is because something, some event, some pinprick even, disturbs the edges of what we’ve taken as reality. — © Jeff Vandermeer
When we wake, it is because something, some event, some pinprick even, disturbs the edges of what we’ve taken as reality.
Some good leaders are rough around the edges and some leaders are difficult. Some have difficult personalities and some are really nice to be around, but those are not the qualifications. The qualifications are their desire to see us achieve more, their desire to push us to be the best we can be. Not for their selfish gain, but because they believe that we have something to offer.
The thirst for something other than what we have…to bring something new, even if it is worse, some emotion, some sorrow; when our sensibility, which happiness has silenced like an idle harp, wants to resonate under some hand, even a rough one, and even if it might be broken by it.
Nobody is going to buy one of our dresses because it will do, or as something to hide away in their wardrobe and wear at some dimly undetermined point. They always have an event of some kind in mind. They want to walk in the room and for everybody to think how amazing they look. That's the job, really.
The media, I think, have to be accountable for some of the misdirection that is put forward in politics in some of the misapprehension, maybe even some of the lack of confidence in the political process. Because the most benign, frank thought can be twisted and portrayed as something that it really wasn't intended to.
People with anxiety tend to be hyper-reactive. We are like jack rabbits, off and running to the races, reacting to some event, even while the event is still happening.
All cultures are different. Some commit genocide. Some are uniquely peaceful. Some frequent bathhouses in groups. Some don't show each other the soles of their shoes or like pictures taken of them. Some have enormous hunting festivals or annual stretches when nobody speaks. Some don't use electricity.
Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion. Every event, however brief, has to be sure a contribution to make, lights up some dark corner or even some wide vista of history. Nor is it only political history which benefits most, for every historical landscape - political, economic, social, even geographical - is illumined by the intermittent flare of the event.
Whatever comes and goes, is not reality. See the event as event only. Then you are vulnerable to reality, no longer armoured against it, as you were when you gave reality to events and experiences.
There are a variety of ways in which a wedge is driven between the reality of the world outside, the motion of atoms, and our conception of what is there. Some of it has to do with what we're told, some of it to do with sensibilities that might be described as cultural, some of it to do with habit, some to do with heuristics we, as Homo sapiens, invoke because we cannot do otherwise - to name just a few of the impediments.
Even on a large ensemble where their parts are relatively small - because having ten main characters obviously affects their screen time - the thing that attracts great actors is when there is that challenge to get some reality into something.
Some people feel fulfillment from a bitter end - it gives them some sort of sense of reality. But, when you're dealing with reality, I feel like films should discover the part that is happy. That's also reality. Things working out is a reality. It's encouraging.
For my money, if I'm playing anything then it has to have some sharp angles on it. It's got to have some edges that you can cut yourself on, otherwise it's boring.
Reality in movies is the reality of the story you're telling, so it may not match the reality as we know it, but the reason there's art is that it tries to bring some kind of understanding of all the suffering and joys and pain that we go through. Storytelling brings some value to it.
For something to be great, there has to be some kind of trial or some type of struggle that actually makes it special or valuable to you. Otherwise, anything could be easily taken for granted.
A good many of my poems over the years have alluded to or taken on the political. Stevens has a line in one of his essays: "Reality exerts pressure on the imagination." Inevitably what is omnipresent in the culture exerts its pressure on our imaginations to respond to it, even if indirectly. But in this case the backdrop of 9/11, coincident with the breakup of a marriage, the finding of new love, some kind of personal cataclysm... all of those were forces informing the poems in some way.
Licences to have babies incidentally is something that I got in trouble for some years ago for suggesting even in Canada that this might be necessary at some point, at least some restriction on the right to have a child.
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