A Quote by Alice McDermott

I've always believed you go to literature to find the shared human experience, not the categorized human experience.

Alice McDermott

Quote Topics

Always Always Believe Believed Experience Find Go Human Human Experience Literature Shared

Quote Author

Alice McDermott
American - Writer
Born: June 27, 1953

?Reading good literature is an experience of pleasure...but it is also an experience of learning what and how we are, in our human integrity and our human imperfection, with our actions, our dreams, and our ghosts, alone and in relationships that link us to others, in our public image and in the secret recesses of our consciousness.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Human existence is a brutal experience to me... it's a brutal, meaningless experience - an agonizing, meaningless experience with some oases, delight, some charm and peace, but these are just small oases. Overall, it is a brutal, terrible experience, and so it salvation is what can you do to alleviate the agony of the human condition, the human predicament? That is what interests me the most.

Woody Allen

I think community is a shared history, it's a shared experience. It's not always agreement. In fact, I think that often it isn't. It's the commitment, again, to stay with something - to go the duration. You can't walk away. It's like a marriage, only I think it's more difficult to divorce yourself from community than it is to a human being because the strands are interconnected and so various.

Terry Tempest Williams

We're all human beings. Experience is experience, let's just be honest. Let's not try and dissect suffering into a race, or whatever you want to call it. We're all human beings, one way or another. All races have gone through times that are challenging; that's part of being a human.

Idris Elba

Acting represents all that human beings experience, and if you want it to be 'nice,' you will never be a serious communicator of the human experience.

Larry Moss

There's something really magical about trying to see things in new ways that go beyond, in some sense, the biological human experience. Light-field photography, too, goes beyond the human experience because our eyes work like conventional cameras.

Ren Ng

Of all the alchemies of human connection-sex and childbirth and marriage and friendship-the strangest is this: You can stand up and tell a story that is made entirely, embarrassingly, of "I's," and a listening audience somehow turns each "I" into a "me." This alchemy, of self-absorption into shared experience, is the alchemy of all literature.

Adam Gopnik

One of the ongoing themes in my work, I hope, and one of the things I believe in, is a sense of human nature, a sense of shared humanity above the cultural layers we place on ourselves [which don't] mean that much compared to the human experience.

Chris Hondros

My view is that consciousness, the seat of "personalness," is the ultimate reality, and is also scientifically impenetrable. In other words, there is no scientific test one can postulate that would definitively prove its existence in another entity. We assume that other biological human persons, at least those who are at least acting conscious, are indeed conscious. But this too is an assumption, and this shared human consensus breaks down when we go beyond human experience (e.g., the debate on animal consciousness, and by extension animal rights).

Ray Kurzweil

From our human experience and history, at least as far as I am informed, I know that everything essential and great has only emerged when human beings had a home and were rooted in a tradition. Today's literature is, for instance, largely destructive.

Martin Heidegger

I write the black experience in America, and contained within that experience, because it is a human experience, are all the universalities.

August Wilson

It was fantastic playing Conan; it was such an experience to go out of the country and be this barbaric human savage child for a month or so. It was a blast and definitely a great experience.

Leo Howard

I believe that a writer has to tell what they think is the truth in a human experience. The truth of the human experience cannot escape the political.

Walter Mosley

I never viewed technology as a replacement for the human experience. I viewed it as something that could liberate the human experience.

Sal Khan

The experience of love and the experience of death destroy the illusion of our self-sufficiency. The two are closely connected, and to become fully human we must experience both of them.

David Steindl-Rast

I don't really identify with America, I don't really feel like an American or part of the American experience, and I don't really feel like a member of the human race, to tell you the truth. I know I am, but I really don't. All the definitions are there, but I don't really feel a part of it. I think I have found a detached point of view, an ideal emotional detachment from the American experience and culture and the human experience and culture and human choices.

George Carlin

A Quote by Alice McDermott

Quote Topics

Quote Author

Related Quotes

Related Authors