A Quote by Julia Alvarez

Literature is about being a complex, contradictory human being.

Julia Alvarez

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About Being Complex Contradictory Human Human Being Literature

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Julia Alvarez
American - Novelist
Born: March 27, 1950

I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being--neither white, black, brown, or red; and when you are dealing with humanity as a family there's no question of integration or intermarriage. It's just one human being marrying another human being or one human being living around and with another human being.

Malcolm X

Literature often gets taught nowadays as a record of the sins and shortcomings of the past. I see literature and the arts very differently: as essential to being human and to human progress, individual and collective.

Brian Boyd

The human being that I strive to be is a great human being, like a loving human being, but as an actor, you take on roles that are not you and that's the fun part for me as far as acting goes. You really get to learn about other human beings and not judge.

Common

I'm 100 percent convinced that Pablo Escobar was a human being. And he was a very interesting one. For sure, he was a very, very, very mean and awful human being in many senses, but he wasn't an alien. He was a person. He had friends; people laughed at his jokes. And he was a very contradictory person as well.

Wagner Moura

We need a sense of the oneness of the 7 billion human beings alive today. When I meet people, I don't think about being different from them, about being Tibetan, Buddhist or even the Dalai Lama. I only think about being a human being. We all share the potential for positive and negative emotions, yet one of our special qualities is our human mind, our intelligence. If we use it well we'll be successful and happy.

Dalai Lama

You have to kind of lose yourself and not think about just how brave Mulan is. Yes, I am playing a hero, so we need to bring out that side, but I think every human being is complex, and complex is so beautiful. And that's where the energy of the character is.

Liu Yifei

For me, Paralympic sport isn't about being the best human being. It's about being the best human being with that particular level of disability.

Lee Pearson

Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that?

Kurt Vonnegut

How can anyone be called human, if being born a human being and growing in a human society, he does not recognise human values? You must see that you don't harm any living being. He alone is a redeemed being who causes no pain to others and avoids pain to himself.

Sathya Sai Baba

This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got.

Toni Morrison

I get more out of life just being myself, by just being a human being. Not by being a rock star, not by being whatever. Sometimes I act like a jerk, but I think people respect me for being myself. That's the ultimate thing about the Smashing Pumpkins.

Billy Corgan

I'm being sincere and I'm being human. I'm making mistakes or I'm doing things correctly, but I'm being human regardless. I'm talking about my pain and my joy, and I'm not saying it with words but mainly with colors and shapes. That's what I tried to do with the utmost sincerity and humility of a child.

Alex Abreu

To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.

Sinclair Lewis

A lot of the things I've talked about are being a human being, being respectful, and really just caring about others, and trying to draw the line in the sand when it comes to hate and divisiveness.

Kenny Stills

I've done my share of reading about Abraham Lincoln, throughout my life, and he wasn't always carved in stone. He was a human being. He was a very thoughtful, self-educated, complex, magnanimous human being, who was very, very strong, very smart and very canny, with a very strong sense of what was right and what was wrong. Through all that, he's become an icon, over the years, and some of his warmth and humanity has been lost. You don't tend to think of Lincoln as this warm, funny person, but he was.

Billy Campbell

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity. The appeal of literature is that it is so thoroughly a human thing — by, for and about human beings. If you lose that focus, you obviate the source of the power and permanence of literature.

M. H. Abrams

A Quote by Julia Alvarez

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