I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems... It's got to be something inspiring, even if it is vicarious.
If you've been married for 400 years, as I have, it's nice to experience first love again and you can vicariously through a book.
Better that one heart be broken a thousand times in the retelling, he has decided, if it means that a thousand other hearts need not be broken at all.
It is pleasant, when the sea runs high, to view from land the great distress of another.
Reading has always been the largest and most irreplaceable pleasure for Vincent; reading about other people's successes and failures, joys and sufferings seemed to bury his own failures.
If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen.
History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.
I feel like I've come out of this grown up, maybe because I live through the character vicariously and she grows up so much during the course of this story.
One of my favorite things in books is watching someone make the mistake. You know it's going to happen. You keep thinking: 'Don't do it!' But of course they're going to do it. It's riveting. You learn through them that it's okay. It's the ecstatic fall, where you watch someone make that terrible decision, and there's such pleasure in it.
You used the word "civilization", which means a set of abstractions, symbols, conventions. Experience tends to be vicarious; emotions are predigested and electrical; ideas become more real than things.
His eyes beheld beauty not in reality but in the printed word. Standing in the waiting-room, he realized that in his life he had accepted secondary experience -- the experience of reading someone else's thoughts -- over real life.
Pity is a sense of our own misfortunes in those of another man; it is a sort of foresight of the disasters which may befall ourselves. We assist others,, in order that they may assist us on like occasions; so that the services we offer to the unfortunate are in reality so many anticipated kindnesses to ourselves.
Mistakes are the best teachers. One does not learn from success. It is desirable to learn vicariously from other people's failures, but it gets much more firmly seared in when they are your own.
People fantasize about being a hero and helping someone in trouble. Batman is that fantasy realized-not just for Bruce Wayne, but for the audience. Inwardly, Bruce Wayne is still an adolescent watching his parents being murdered. That will never leave him. And people really relate to that.
It's like reading a book about a life that you will never occupy, but that's the beauty of being transported.
As an audience member, I live vicariously through the characters I watch or read about. There's something very relatable about comic-book characters. They're never perfect. They're flawed people put in extraordinary circumstances.
I suppose that's why we watch dramas: to see the stuff that in real life you'd end up in prison for.
Novel-writing is the only place where someone who would have liked to do anything can still do that vicariously.
Reading is seeing by proxy.
I have died too many deaths that were not mine.
History at its best is vicarious experience.
With prurient absorption and only minimal risk, we can pretend to be the subject of the lead article on the front page of the Style section of our local newspaper for as long as it takes to finish our morning coffee.
Ugliness and evil are necessary for growth but they may be experienced vicariously.
It’s like your batteries get low, and you need to charge them on someone else’s story.
Fiction is all about vicarious experiences and getting into other people's heads in a way that no other art form lets you.
