Contrasting Realities Quotes

For two years, I'd lived in Silicon Valley, surrounded by other highly educated transplants with seemingly perfect lives. It's jarring to live in a world where every person feels his life will only get better when you came from a world where many rightfully believe that things have become worse.

Everything is as it was, I discover when I reach my destination, and everything has changed.

It's jarring to go from one amazing experience to another that feels ordinary. I don't quite know how to explain it. You see the uniqueness of what you've been doing, and disassociating yourself from it and going back to the 'normal' life is tough.

The Language of the Dream/Night is contrary to that of Waking/Day. It is a language of Images and Sensations, the various dialects of which are far less different from each other, than the various Day-Languages of Nations.

There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.

My sisters and I were fortunate to travel through Asia and Europe at very young ages. We confronted extraordinary beauty in Athens and unspeakable poverty in India.

What is an adventure? That depends on where you are starting from. Little girls in your country, they hide in the gap between the washing machine and the refrigerator and they make believe they are in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around them. Me and my sister, we used to hide in a gap in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around us, and make believe that we had a washing machine and a refrigerator. You live in a world of machines and you dream off things with beating hearts. We dream of machines, because we see where beating hearts have left us.

'New Jack City' and 'Boyz 'N the Hood' are realities, but movies like 'Strictly Business' are realities, too.

My own career reflects a strange dichotomy between the world we've long known and the world that will become.

What is my truth can not be your truth.

Everyone's life experience is different.

Our lives don't make sense in abstraction, only when compared with the lives of others.

Our hearts are being stretched to span the violence and the suffering in our lives and world, and at the same time we are also witness to so much magnificence and brilliance. We are a species that has produced nuclear weapons, and also one that has developed profound insight into the nature of life itself.

There's nothing like reading about a world that feels dead to throw your own beautiful, colorful life into sharp relief.

Ruin for some [is] prosperity for others.

Home was extremely normal. But my dad's life was quite exotic, really. When I went away to stay with him, it was a different world. I never wanted to be in that world. I was much happier with my mates at home.

My parents had an experience of life that is as opposite to mine as you can imagine.

You know I got kicked out of high school and I used to go to Hendrix concerts. I used to go see Marvin Gaye and B.B. King and so here I am on television as an actor playing the part of this really sweet wholesome all American boy. The reality was I had a much different kind of teenage life.

I try to contrast; life today is full of contrast... We have to change.

You can't have the word 'fantasy' or 'fantastical' without a contrast. It has to stem from a grounded experience.

Life is full of contrasts.

We always had power shortages in the country. I was living right next to the border with China, and it was the only country I could compare to my own. When I looked across the river, it was a completely different world - there were no people dying. It looked like a place full of colour, and that's what confused me.

India lives in several centuries at the same time. Every night outside my house I pass a road gang of emaciated laborers digging a trench to lay fiber optic cables to speed up digital revolution. They work by the light of a few candles.

I live in such a sweet world in the world of 'Home Improvement' that I tend to be drawn to stuff that's really on the other end of the spectrum entirely.

The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city.