In documentary filmmaking, there’s a tradition of telling stories about victims. We often do that from a very patronizing place, but mostly we do it from a very selfish place, to reassure ourselves that our lives are in sympathy and solidarity with the victims.
I think sometimes what people miss about black people is that we’re complicated, that we are indeed messy, that we do our best with what we’ve been given. We come into the world exactly like you. It’s just that there are circumstances in the culture that are dictated and put on our lives that we have to fight against.
The way we behave, our views and outlooks really have their sources some place. They come from somewhere. Sometimes we don’t even know what they are, and yet they’re very powerful in our lives.
Until I began to build and launch rockets, I didn’t know my hometown was at war with itself over its children and that my parents were locked in a kind of bloodless combat over how my brother and I would live our lives.
Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace.
I have one really nice watch. It’s a white-face, stainless-steel Rolex Daytona. I wear it a lot. I got that in the middle of ‘The Office.’ All the guys in the writers’ room were like, ‘Let’s all get a nice watch.’ We were too busy to upgrade our lives in a big way, but we thought this was a nice symbolic gesture.
Even during the worst hardships, when the other things in our lives seem to fall apart, we can still find peace in the eternal love of God.
Our lives are structured by our memories of events. Event X happened just before the big Paris vacation. I was doing Y in the first summer after I learned to drive. Z happened the weekend after I landed my first job. We remember events by positioning them in time relative to other events.
I think we go through our lives limiting our potential, and when times are tough, it’s easy to convince ourselves that something isn’t possible, but if you start there, then you limit yourself and the possibilities of what you can create.
What’s really important in life? Sitting on a beach? Looking at television eight hours a day? I think we have to appreciate that we’re alive for only a limited period of time, and we’ll spend most of our lives working.
We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.
God has put within our lives meanings and possibilities that quite outrun the limits of mortality.
It was there I met my future wife, Celeste Landry, although our lives took us separate ways for many years and we were not to marry until more than ten years later.
Every night of our lives, we dream, and our brain concocts visions which are, at least until we wake up, highly convincing. Most of us have had experiences which are verging on hallucination. It shows the power of the brain to knock up illusions.
With every little bit of change we make in our lives, we can maximize that small change simply by asking ourselves: ‘What’s next? What can I do now? What additional responsibility can I take on?’
I think we’ve all been misled, at moments in our lives, certainly in school situations, and things like that, with getting with the wrong group briefly, or falling in with someone who we learn the truth about and no longer want to really be with.
The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation.
It’s an old principle, as old as the Buddha or Marcus Aurelius: We need at times to step away from our lives in order to put them in perspective. Especially if we wish to be productive.
Let’s choose today to quench our thirst for the ‘good life’ we thinks others lead by acknowledging the good that already exists in our lives. We can then offer the universe the gift of our grateful hearts.
A little prosperity and peace, or even a turn slightly for the better, can bring us feelings of self-sufficiency. We can feel quickly that we are in control of our lives, that the change for the better is our own doing, not that of a God who communicates to us through the still, small voice of the Spirit.
Memories of our lives, of our works and our deeds will continue in others.
At the end of our lives we all ask, ‘Did I live? Did I love? Did I matter?’
We have so much room for improvement. Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory… of how we are taking responsibility.
We all have big changes in our lives that are more or less a second chance.
Like Jermaine was saying, it’s a beautiful day, and we’re just glad all of this is behind us. We can go on with our lives. And Michael can go on with his life and do what he does best, and that’s making good music, making his fans happy, people happy all over the world.
We all perform our lives in a way. And the actor is a perfect metaphor to get at that theme of ‘how do we find our authentic selves?’ And that we all – whether we’re actors or not – perform ourselves. As a way of searching. As a way of fumbling around and trying to say, is this my voice? Is this who I am?
I think it’s crucial that we remember the lives of people, not their deaths. Our deaths are not our lives.
Most of us don’t live lives that lend themselves to novelistic expression, because our lives are so fragmented.
You know, I’m a Christian and I believe that God has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives and that he can intercede in all kinds of situations and we need to have a little faith in many things.
We don’t naturally want to take responsibility for our lives. We want to give the responsibility to someone else. We blame them when our lives aren’t good.
Everybody has heard that family dinner is great for kids. But unfortunately, it doesn’t work in many of our lives.
When we are at the worst times of our lives, when we are battling with something, or struggles, whatever it may be, when we are at our highest point as well, when things are going really well, we want somebody to comfort us and be there for us and to say, ‘Well done.’ That’s Jesus!
Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?
When I was a child, life felt so slow because all I wanted to do was get into show business. Each day seemed like a year, but when you get older, years pass like minutes. I wish there was a tape recorder where we could just slow our lives down.
Christian teaching about sex is not a set of isolated prohibitions; it is an integral part of what the Bible has to say about living in such a way that our lives communicate the character of God.
When your life is as precious as all our lives are, then it needs to be kept precious and looked after and treated well. And that is not something we should be sharing with a wider audience.
To establish true self-esteem we must concentrate on our successes and forget about the failures and the negatives in our lives.
We just simply want to get back to basics, get – restore essentially the constitutional foundation of the country, and that means the federal government becoming less onerous, less involved in every – basically every item of our lives. And what that means is there does have to be some transition.
The Millennials, a generation born digital, will have a much stronger impact on social behaviour than we currently assume. Global climate change and resource security will influence our lives in substantial ways.
Let’s be cautious about relying so much on material things that we have no energy left for the spiritual aspects of our lives.
We are accountable for our actions as we exercise our moral agency. If we understand this principle and make righteous choices, our lives will be blessed.
We all must live our lives always feeling, always thinking the moment has arrived.
I believe that we have the ability to change our lives using our imaginations. Imagination is a muscle – the more you use it, the stronger it gets.
I didn’t want to be trapped in an idea of replicating other ‘Star Trek’ characters; especially Vulcans. But my love and I have Spock paraphernalia all over our house. He’s an omnipresence in our lives, we adore him.
There are good people and bad people in all organizations fundamentally however, when you look at the basis of the Tea Party it has nothing to do with race. It has to do with an economic recovery. It has to do with limiting the role of our government in our lives. It has to do with free markets.
Writing is a way of processing our lives. And it can be a way of healing.
When I first ran for public office, it was with the passion and idealism of a young man who believed that government could help make our lives better, that public service was a calling and that citizenship demanded responsibilities. There was a greater good.
When we clear the physical clutter from our lives, we literally make way for inspiration and ‘good, orderly direction’ to enter.
Art is a mind-game that we do to make our lives easier. If it isn’t for that, it becomes superfluous.
I have come a long way and learnt a lot. I read this quote about a year ago: ‘Happiness must not be pursued; it must ensue.’ It’s made me realise that just being married again or something like that won’t make me happy; the happiness ensues from how we live our lives.
