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.
My mother's belief in spiritual healers grew stronger after our family went through a rough patch following my father's death. Sufi saint Karimullah Shah Kadri changed our lives, and all of us converted to Sufism. But it wasn't an instantaneous decision - it took us 10 years to convert. The change in religion was like washing away the past.
We are all racing towards death. No matter how many great, intellectual conclusions we draw during our lives, we know they're all only man-made, like God. I begin to wonder where it all leads. What can you do, except do what you can do as best you know how.
Christmas is a story that has both religious and pagan origins, and to ignore its power is to ignore the power of myth - those symbols and legends that help us to ground our lives.
To me, what I'm interested in, in the end, is the meaning of food in our lives.
We go through our lives in a continual dance of being filled with something that needs an answer, and then going out and finding that answer... only to find out that our answer wasn't quite the answer.
We live in such a digital age. Paper is going out of our lives. A poem on paper is tangible.
Our lives are in God's hands. We have no control. We can't control Him by using the Bible or cross as a good luck charm without a thorough reformation of heart and life.
Bush's presidency is revisionism-proof. We're going to be recovering from it for the rest of our lives.
It's a physical thing that can grab a hold of data and literally rearrange our lives by changing the direction you take your car in. This continuum is going to keep building on itself as we move forward into the future.
All our lives are enriched by the leadership and excellence and confidence of female athletes, whether the Mia Hamms and Maya Moores we know or the field hockey, lacrosse and track and field athletes we do not necessarily know.
Our lives are universally shortened by our ignorance.
We must improve our lives and we will do it together - all of our citizens and myself as president of Ukraine.
Evolution isn't just a story about where we came from. It's an epic at the center of life itself. Far from robbing our lives of meaning, it instills an appreciation for the beautiful, enduring, and ultimately triumphant fabric of life that covers our planet. Understanding that doesn't demean human life - it enhances it.
When technology reaches that level of invisibility in our lives, that's our ultimate goal. It vanishes into our lives. It says, 'You don't have to do the work; I'll do the work.'
I'm not saying we have power over everything in our lives - if that were true, my hair would look so, so different - but I am saying that there's no circumstance in which we are completely powerless.
Facebook draws from the public and public-interest sphere, a simultaneously bold and modest step towards acknowledging that our new networked technologies deeply affect our lives in ways not always captured or best shaped by the typical template of consumer and seller.
The best fantasy does not offer an answer to our lives, it is an offering that acknowledges enough of the truth to resonate and add to the understanding about the human condition.
If we are paying attention to our lives, we'll recognise those defining moments. The challenge for so many of us is that we are so deep into daily distractions and 'being busy, busy' that we miss out on those moments and opportunities that - if jumped on - would get our careers and personal lives to a whole new level of wow.
Human beings are social creatures - not occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our lives as both cause and effect.
Let our lives be in accordance with our convictions of right, each striving to carry out our principles.
When we were children, we were told that we have a motherland, and that motherland was Spain. However, we have discovered later, in our lives, that as a matter of fact, we have several motherlands. And one of the greatest motherlands of all is, no doubt, Africa.
I've always had an uneasy relationship with technology and how it insinuates itself into our lives: for example. I always prefer talking face-to-face with friends than texting or calling, and if I want to get updates on their lives, I don't go to Facebook but meet them in person.
Our morality is based on so many factors: of where we were born, who we were born to, what values were instilled in us, what values we chose, the way that our lives have shaped us. That dictates so much of what we assume is our morality, and also the culture, all of these things.
I was thinking recently about the popularity of TV shows about people shopping for houses. I wonder if part of their appeal is the chance to vicariously imagine our lives playing out in a variety of spaces. We have a sense that the shape and style of our dwellings affects the shapes of the lives that unfold within them.
I love the role that men play in our lives.
I think celebrity has become almost normalized. I feel like we all live our lives in a pale imitation of celebrity. With Facebook, we choose a photo that is not too good a photo - we're more arch than that. We're our own celebrity publicists. We understand it so innately.
The real meditation practice is how we live our lives from moment to moment to moment.
I love the sense of looking at the sad, paltry, and yet very familiar spectacle that we must make from moment to moment in our lives, and in our frenzy, as something that's as out there as alien life.
New Year's Resolutions come and go. Some we keep, some we don't. In order to make lasting changes in our lives, we must first change our minds. We sometimes forget, and we often feel stuck, but we all have the power to do so.
I've never really found inspiration for story ideas in the news, but I'd say it certainly affects our lives in so many ways. I would say that certainly the stories of the day appear in the work - I just have never gone so far as to say, well, this particular event could influence a plot of an entire book.
There are many ways of encouraging people to make life better other than joining a political party. Politics with a small 'p' isn't just about darkened committee rooms, endless meetings - it is about giving people the right to make decisions about our lives.
We're past the age of heroes and hero kings... Most of our lives are basically mundane and dull, and it's up to the writer to find ways to make them interesting.
Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.
The task which we have set ourselves is simply to show why and for what purpose we hold that standpoint during most of our lives, and why and for what purpose we are provisionally obliged to abandon it.
I think we spend so much of our lives trying to pretend that we know what's going to happen next. In fact we don't. To recognize that we don't know even what will happen this afternoon and yet having the courage to move forward - that's one meaning of faith.
