Quotes About Engagement

If you want to make someone feel emotion, you have to make them let go. Listening to something is an act of surrender.

You have to surrender less when you see a film than when you go and see something live.

Engagement is not appeasement. Engagement is not surrender.

Surrender is working with what happens.

Every role is a new form of surrender.

The ear will surrender even at those times when the eye wants to close, when the eye doesn't want to watch.

I've never been a surrogate for Bernie, Hillary, or the DNC.

I only surround myself with people who are intellectually stimulating.

With better gear, firefighters no longer surround and drown a fire - they go in.

I looked at Spangler. He was leaning forward so far he was almost out of his chair. He looked as if he was going to jump. I couldn't think of any reason why he should jump, so I thought he must be excited. I looked back at Breeze. He was about as excited as a hole in the wall.

I got down off the stool and stood waiting. She might or might not blow me down. I didn't particularly care. Once in a while in this much too sex-conscious country a man and a woman can meet and talk without dragging bedrooms into it. This could be it, or she could just think I was on the make. If so, the hell with her.

Kind of smart guesser, ain't you, young man? Can't wait for folks to get their mouth open hardly." "I'm sorry, Mrs. Morrison. This is an important matter to us—" "This here young man don't seem to have no trouble keepin' his mouth in place." "He's married," I said. "He's had practice.

His blue eyes frosted. 'Are you attempting to tell me my duties, sir?' 'No. But I'm having a lot of fun trying to guess what they are.

One must exert oneself in order to achieve a life that matters. If you don't exert yourself, or if your exertions don't amount to much of anything, then you might as well not have bothered to have shown up for your existence at all.

In great cities, spaces as well as places are designed and built: walking, witnessing, being in public, are as much part of the design and purpose as is being inside to eat, sleep, make shoes or love or music. The word citizen has to do with cities, and the ideal city is organized around citizenship -- around participation in public life.

The purpose of activism and art, or at least of mine, is to make a world in which people are producers of meaning, not consumers....

Many of the great humanitarian and environmental campaigns of our time have been to make the unknown real, the invisible visible, to bring the faraway near, so that the suffering of sweatshop workers, torture victims, beaten children, even the destruction of other species and remote places, impinges on the imagination and perhaps prompts you to act.

We have, most of us, a deep desire for this democratic public life, for a voice, for membership, for purpose and meaning that cannot be only personal. We want larger selves and a larger world.

A lone walker is both present and detached from the world around, more than an audience but less than a participant.

When I read, I ceased to be my-self, and this nonexistence I pursued and devoured like a drug.

James continued. "The only thing needed henceforward is to inflame the civic temper as past history has inflamed the military temper.

When I think back to why I was apolitical into my mid-twenties I see that being politically engaged means having a sense of your own power--that what you do matters--and a sense of belonging, things that came to me only later and that do not come to all.

Walking maintains the publicness and viability of public space.

You are not just a consumer. You are a citizen of this Earth and your responsibility is not private but public, not individual but social.