Hustler of Culture
"Through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself. Through our ears,
the universe is listening to its harmonies. We are the witnesses
through which the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its
magnificence."
—Alan Watts (via the wonderful documentary Encounters at the End of the World).
"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap
between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were
instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish
spurting out ink."
—George Orwell (via Jessa June)
"Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity."
–Hippocrates.
"One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being."
—May Sarton (via The Writer's Almanac).
"I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today."
—David Foster Wallace (in a letter to Don DeLillo)
"The key to success is to be Goliath but always think like David."
–Terry O'Reilly (Host of "The Age of Persuasion", a fantastic radio show about advertising)
"Confront the dark parts of yourself. … Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing."
—August Wilson (whose birthday is today)
(via The Writer's Almanac)
"Be good to yourself. it's the least you can do. Be good to yourself. it's the most you can do."
"Academe is full of potential geniuses who have never done a single
thing they wanted to do because there were too many things that needed
to be done first: the research projects, conference papers, books and
articles — not one of them freely chosen: merely means to some
practical end, a career rather than a calling. And so we complete
research projects that no longer interest us and write books that no
one will read; or we teach with indifference, dutifully boring our
students, marking our time until retirement, and slowly forgetting why
we entered the profession: because something excited us so much that we
subordinated every other obligation to follow it."
—W.A. Pannapacker (in this article)
"If you are writing the clearest, truest words you can find and doing
the best you can to understand and communicate, this will shine on
paper like its own little lighthouse. Lighthouses don't go running all
over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there
shining."
—Anne Lamott (Whose birthday is today).
(via The Writer's Almanac).