“The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it's as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues.”

— Terry Pratchett , book Moving Pictures

Source: Moving Pictures

Last update Sept. 29, 2023. History

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Terry Pratchett 796

English author 1948–2015

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“I watched an old American submarine movie on television. The creaking plot had the captain and first officer constantly at each other’s throat. The submarine was a fossil, and one guy had claustrophobia. But all that didn’t stop everything from working out well in the end. It was an everything-works-out-in-the-end-so-maybe-war’s-not-so-bad-after-all sort of film. One of these days they’ll be making a film where the whole human race gets wiped out in a nuclear war, but everything works out in the end.”

Haruki Murakami (1949) Japanese author, novelist

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“If you are always frightened for yourself you can't act, and then life loses its purpose. You just have to tell yourself that, when you get right down to it, you don't matter all that much.”

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“Love her? You're devoid of all feeling. You lack common decency. You know how to express yourself. You always have just the right words. There's just one thing you haven't the slightest clue about: life itself. You're a craven coward, but a genius at evasions and excuses.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

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“I was starting to see that what looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself; maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it.”

Jodi Picoult book Handle With Care

Variant: What looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe ittake a crisis to get to know yourself; maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it.
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“You start to think, when you’re younger, how important everything is and how things have to go right—your job, your career, your life, your choices, and all of that. Then, after a while, you start to realise that – I’m talking the big picture here – eventually you die, and eventually the sun burns out and the earth is gone, and eventually all the stars and all the planets in the entire universe go, disappear, and nothing is left at all. Nothing – Shakespeare and Beethoven and Michelangelo gone. And you think to yourself that there’s a lot of noise and sound and fury – and where’s it going? It’s not going any place… Now, you can’t actually live your life like that, because if you do you just sit there and – why do anything? Why get up in the morning and do anything? So I think it’s the job of the artist to try and figure out why, given this terrible fact, you want to go on living.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

Interview with France 24 (2010) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MsuqvLIttk.

“It doesn't matter if a million people tell you what you can't do, or if ten million tell you no. If you get one yes from God that's all you need.”

Tyler Perry (1966) American actor, director, screenwriter, playwright, producer, author, and songwriter

“You know that Johnny Cash song "A Boy Named Sue" where he gives the kid a girl's name, and the kid is beaten up at every stage in his life by macho guys, but in the end he becomes the toughest man. … By not encouraging me to be a musician, even though that's all he ever wanted to be, he's made me one. By telling me never to have big dreams or else, that to dream is to be disappointed, he made me have big dreams. By telling me that the band would only last five minutes or ten minutes — we're still here.”

Bono (1960) Irish rock musician, singer of U2

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“It'll start getting cooler. You just watch.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Trump described his stance on climate science and global warming, as quoted in * 2020-09-14
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https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/14/politics/donald-trump-wildfires-briefing-climate-change/index.html
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“So, the bottom line is: if you want to live well and die well, you first have to find out what is really important to you and stick to it. With that, you can get out there and get yourself a life, a real one.”

Gian Domenico Borasio (1962) physician, specialist of palliative medicine

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“It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spread. And in the middle, it's dense, isn't it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets get finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlique, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you're a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, and don't feel that we're still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually—if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning— you're not something that's a result of the big bang. You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are. When I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as—Mr so-and- so, Ms so-and-so, Mrs so-and-so—I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular way. I know I'm that, too. But we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it.”

Alan Watts (1915–1973) British philosopher, writer and speaker

The Nature of Consciousness http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/watts_alan/watts_alan_article1.shtml; also published as What Is Reality? (1989)

“The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it's as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues.”

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Terry Pratchett 796

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