Category: quote

The wreck of his life

Earlier this week, someone in a writers group I attend asked me where do I get the ideas I write about. My answer was a paraphrase of something Hemingway wrote to Fitzgerald. Here’s the exact quote from his letter in 1929:

“The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life–and one is as good as the other.”
–Ernest Hemingway

He also wrote something to the idea that he learned to write by examining the simplest of things.

Quote: yet we cannot look away

“With e-mail, which is checked minute to minute… All day long, light is being beamed into our eyes…. accelerating change in how we read has enormous physical and behavioral consequences…. yet we cannot look away…”

—John Freeman

Quote: the journey is your narrative

“The process of writing . . . is . . . a journey by boat. . . . If you get distracted or allow yourself to drift, you will never make it to the destination. . . . The journey is your narrative.”

—Walter Mosley

Quote: The ancient Celts distinguished the poet…

“The ancient Celts… distinguished the poet, who was originally a priest and judge as well and whose person was sacrosanct, from the mere gleeman. He was in Irish called fili, a seer, which is Welsh derwydd, or oak-seer, which is the probable derivation of Druid. Even kings came under his moral tutelage.”

–Robert Graves

Quote: Most people believe that technology is a staunch friend

“. . . most people believe that technology is a staunch friend. There are two reasons for this. First, technology is a friend. It makes life easier, cleaner, and longer. Can anyone ask more of a friend? Second, because of its lengthy, intimate, and inevitable relationship with culture, technology does not invite a close examination of its own consequences. It is the kind of friend that asks for trust and obedience, which most people are inclined to give because its gifts are truly bountiful. But, of course, there is a dark side to this friend. Its gifts are not without a heavy cost.”

–Neil Postman

Quote: “Technology is…”

“Whether or not it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science.”

–Paul Goodman, “Can Technology Be Humane?” The New York Review of Books, November 20, 1969

Quote: Simone Weil

“Distance is the soul of beauty.”

–Simone Weil

Quote: “Two attributes of a poet…”

“Two attributes of a poet, avidity of the eye and the desire to describe that which he sees.”

–Czeslaw Milosz

Quote: “Internet addiction appears to be a common disorder…”

The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition contains definitions and diagnostic criteria for every mental disorder you can imagine…. In 2008, the Journal of American Psychiatry argued that “Internet addiction appears to be a common disorder that merits inclusion in DSM-V.” …. The following pathologies run rampant on the ‘Net:

  • Generalized Trolling Compulsion.
  • Comments Derangement Syndrome.
  • Manic Confirmation Bias.
  • Fanboy Disorder.
  • Delusional Capital Exchange Disorder.
  • Narcissistic Market Prognostication Imbalance.
  • and more

Link: Beyond Internet addiction: Ars diagnoses your online maladies

Quote: “The air itself is one vast library…”

What a strange chaos is this wide atmosphere we breathe! … The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are for ever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered. There, in their mutable but unerring characters, mixed with the earliest, as well as the latest sighs of mortality, stand for ever recorded, vows unredeemed, promises unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united movements of each particle, the testimony of man’s changeful will.

—Charles Babbage

A library of Babel concealed in the very air we breathe. (via alphacaeli)

Quote: “No take-backs, no do-overs.”

In social media there are no take-backs, no do-overs.

—Ronnie, “Beware the Dark Side” (via Develop Socially)

Quote: “All the words that I utter…”

All the words that I utter,
And all the words that I write,
Must spread out their wings untiring,
And never rest in their flight,
Till they come where your sad, sad heart is,
And sing to you in the night,
Beyond where the waters are moving,
Storm-darken’d or starry bright.

—  William Butler Yeats, “Where My Books Go” (via bookoasis)

Quote: “The art of writing is…”

“The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.”

Gustave Flaubert (via absynthe-words)

Quote: “poems are like dreams…”

But poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.

Adrienne Rich, ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’ On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (via thedaysarenotfullenough) (via libraryland)

Quote: “I use the Internet intensely….”

I didn’t foresee that my whole little life was going to revolve around this object, this computer. That’s worth exploring to me, not simply being critical of it. If you’re going to have a movie about people my age in L.A., they’re going to have to be online a lot of the time or it’s not realistic. But for anything to happen, they have to stop being online. All of those little moments throughout the day when you’re like “What am I doing? Who am I?” I just check my e-mail, or I go online. That sort of mini-lost feeling isn’t new, but I’m curious what happens when you don’t really have to see it through, ever. There is always a distraction.

Miranda July, on the characters in her new film, The Future (via thesalinasvalley)

Quote: “Our brains are affected … by the media we use”

“I’ve always been suspicious of those who seek to describe the effects of digital media in generational terms, drawing sharp contrasts between young “Internet natives” and old “Internet immigrants.” Such distinctions strike me as misleading, if not specious. If you look at statistics … the average adult has spent more time online than the average kid. …. And the idea that those who grow up peering at screens will somehow manage to avoid the cognitive toll exacted by multitasking and persistent interruptions is a fantasy contradicted by neuroscientific research. All of us, young and old alike, have similar neurons and synapses, and our brains are affected in similar ways by the media we use.”

Nick Carr, from the afterword of the paperback edition of The Shallows (via wwnorton)

Quote: “Lock up your libraries if you like…”

“Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

Virginia Woolf (via nocureforcuriosity)

Quote: “Art is not a handicraft…”

“Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.”

Leo Tolstoy (via subcreation)

Quote: “The short story is the art form…”

“The short story is the art form that deals with the individual when there is no longer a society to absorb him, and when he is compelled to exist, as it were, by his own inner light.”

Frank O’Connor (via libraryland)

Quote: “Turn the unspeakable into words”

“The writer’s job is to turn the unspeakable into words – not just any words, but, if you can, into rhythm and blues.”

Anne Lamott (via teachingliteracy)

Quote: “If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts”

How do you publicize the necessity to disengage from status quo and social media pressures? Read this article, “Solitude and Leadership.” Actually, it is an essay/lecture by William Deresiewicz. Take your ear buds out. Put away your mobile device (and tablet). Find a quiet corner of a public library (as I am doing presently). And read the essay from beginning to end. Here’s another acorn from the tree to whet your appetite:

“…true leadership means being able to think for yourself and act on your convictions.

One of the consequences for following this wisdom is you will not be popular. Here is another acorn to digest:

“Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.”

Does that sound familiar? Do you see the need for undistracted time and space to develop ideas?

NOTES:

[1] William Deresiewicz, “Solitude and Leadership,” The American Scholar, Spring 2010 accessed April 8, 2014 http://theamericanscholar.org/solitude-and-leadership/#.U0QWZa1dXKI

Good design is more than this


(image via Jonathan Trier Brikner)

There’s more to being a design genius than this. Truly.

Just because you have a computer, laptop or tablet allowing you to download free fonts and free images and use some free app you discovered on Twitter does not make you a design genius.

Just because you “designed” a cool graphic image the way many misled souls believe they labored and “built” an IKEA bookshelf does not make you a design genius. [1]

Celebrated graphic designer, Milton Glaser, put it best:

Computers are to design as microwaves are to cooking.

Good design solves problems and presents stories. As a creative director for an international publishing house, my chief goal is to attract potential readers to new books by capturing a story in a single cover image. To illustrate the point further, an author (for whom I had just completed a book design) emailed me recently: “I’m getting some great feedback on my Facebook page about the cover. Thank you very much…” Good design is about communication: problem solved, story told.

NOTE: [1] For what it is worth, IKEA is not good design. It is nothing more than cheaper-than-Wal-mart veneer furniture, second-rate fabric products and wax-paper lamps. And don’t call IKEA “modern design” because modern design is so 1948. Seriously, the modernist movement began almost a century ago. But I digress.

Quote: “Poetry exists… to sing the praises…”

I think poetry exists partly in order to sing the praises of who and what we love. . . . As well as for the purpose of showing us ourselves, at our worst as well as at our best.

—Sharon Olds [1]

SOURCE: [1] Megan O’Grady, “Fine Print: Poet Sharon Olds Chronicles the End of Her Marriage in a New Collection,” Vogue, accessed August 28, 2012, http://www.vogue.com/culture/article/fine-print-poet-sharon-olds-chronicles-the-end-of-her-marriage-in-a-new-collection/#1.

Gen-Yers changing the workplace

Gen-Yers are using their personal networks and profiles as an extension of their professional personality. Even though they are using Facebook to mostly socialize with family and friends, they are inadvertently blending the two. Sixty-four percent of Gen-Y fails to list their employer on their profiles, yet they add an average of 16 co-workers each to their “friend” group.

Generation Y: The New Kind of Workforce (via thenextweb)