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I have very strongly this feeling... that our everyday life is at one and the same time banal, overfamiliar, platitudinous and yet mysterious and extraordinary.
--
Heidegger and Modern Existentialism (1977) BBC Productions

 

Bryan Magee

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I'm not religious, but I believe in the ecstasy that art and religion can create in human beings, the ecstatic or the awe — as I like to call it, you know, "a-w-e" — that it makes people feel in a way that isn't their banal, everyday feel. That they go, "My God, it transformed me. My life changed."

 

Julie Taymor

 

As a teacher, I have seen time and again a certain kind of American middle-class girl who projects winsome malleability, a soft, unfocused help-me-please persona that, in adult life, is a recipe for disaster. These are the ones who end up with a string of abusive boyfriends or in sticky situations with overfamiliar male authority figures who call them “honey.”

 

Camille Paglia

 

With everything ahead of us
We left everything behind.
But nothing that we needed;
At least not at this time.
And now the feeling that I’m feeling,
Well it’s feeling like my life is finally mine.
With nothing to go back to we just continue to drive.

 

Jack (musician) Johnson

 

I certainly do have this feeling of affection for the absolute sense of intellectual freedom that exists as a live nerve, a live wire, right through the center of American life. ... Every time I get totally discouraged with this country, I remind myself, "No, the fact is that finally we can really say what we think, and some extraordinary things have come out of that."

 

Norman Mailer

 

I longed for activity, instead of an even flow of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to renounce self for the sake of my love. I was conscious of a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life. I had bouts of depression, which I tried to hide, as something to be ashamed of…My mind, even my senses were occupied, but there was another feeling – the feeling of youth and a craving for activity – which found no scope in our quiet life…So time went by, the snow piled higher and higher round the house, and there we remained together, always and for ever alone and just the same in each other’s eyes; while somewhere far away amidst glitter and noise multitudes of people thrilled, suffered and rejoiced, without one thought of us and our existence which was ebbing away. Worst of all, I felt that every day that passed riveted another link to the chain of habit which was binding our life into a fixed shape, that our emotions, ceasing to be spontaneous, were being subordinated to the even, passionless flow of time… ‘It’s all very well … ‘ I thought, ‘it’s all very well to do good and lead upright lives, as he says, but we’ll have plenty of time for that later, and there are other things for which the time is now or never.’ I wanted, not what I had got, but a life of challenge; I wanted feeling to guide us in life, and not life to guide us in feeling.

 

Leo Tolstoy