Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.
Jack Kerouac, whose birthday was Saturday. Happy belated birthday, Jack. Want to read his stuff? We have plenty of items to check out. (via nypl)
Quotes
Can do better, will do better.
Andre Dubus III, Six-Word Memoir from the Memoirville interview at Smith Magazine (via wwnorton)
Time is like air; it is there always, changing people and forming character.
William Trevor (via theparisreview)
People have one great blessing – obscurity – and not really too many people are thankful for it.
Bob Dylan’s Playboy interview, 1966. (via somethingchanged)
Sometimes I think a writer should make up his mind whether he’s going to be a writer or a reader. There isn’t time for both.
Jessamyn West (via theparisreview)
I think a poem, when it works, is an action of the mind captured on a page, and the reader, when he engages it, has to enter into that action. And so his mind repeats that action and travels again through the action, but it is a movement of yourself through a thought, through an activity of thinking, so by the time you get to the end you’re different than you were at the beginning and you feel that difference.
Anne Carson (via theparisreview)
We do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy [an] Android phone…
What isn’t tragic belongs to the comic spirit. The novel is nourished by both and swallows both up greedily.
The act of writing a poem is a bodily act as well as a mental and imaginative act, and the act of reading a poem—even silently—must be bodily before it’s intellectual.
Donald Hall (via theparisreview)
We all think we escape and then spend the rest of our lives writing about our prisons.
If the aim was the dissemination of ideas, the printing press could have accomplished that much better than warfare. If the aim was the progress of civilization, it is easy to see that there are other ways of diffusing civilization more expedient than by the destruction of wealth and of human lives.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace -To the progress that the people of Egypt have shown the world today. (via archivalproject)
I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion
Jack Kerouac (via fluffynotes)
Quote: John Steinbeck
One must withdraw for a time from life in order to set down that picture.
John Steinbeck (via theparisreview)
One reason for writing, of course, is that no one’s written what you want to read.
Philip Larkin (via theparisreview)
Man is a frivolous, a specious creature, and like a Chess player, cares more for the process of attaining his goal than the goal itself.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (via enpasant)
Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.
BOOKSHAKALAKA: The National Book Awards Jam Throws Down for 2010 (via housingworksbookstore)
We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.
Carl Sagan (via crookedindifference)
The underestimation of the human intelligence is the worst sin of our time…
Mortimer J. Adler
Everything is an aggregator for something else, even every link in the chain dilutes the message a little bit more… Stories spread. Word of mouth gets recommendations. Followers and bit.ly clicks don’t mean a damn thing.
tdhurst of antiprguy from Social media is dead
The tape is more an art object that also plays music (similar to vinyl) where the CDR is more a vessel for a piece of music.
Matthew Sage of Patient Sounds, a tape-focused label based out of Fort Collins, Colorado. (via npr)
One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours — all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.
William Faulkner via This Recording (via somethingchanged)
Ein Haus ohne Bücher ist arm, auch wenn schöne Teppiche seinen Boden und kostbare Tapeten und Bilder die Wände bedecken. (A house without books is poor, even if beautiful carpets cover its floor and expensive wallpapers cover the walls.)
Hermann Hesse (via germanheit)
At the heart of an effective creative philosophy is the belief that nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature, what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his actions, even though his language so often camouflages what really motivates him. For if you know these things about a man you can touch him at the core of his being
Bill Bernbach
See more great quotes about advertising and planning/strategy here plannersphere / useful quotes
(via fluffynotes)
There was a brief, shiny moment sometime in the early 90s when Barnes & Nobles and Borders were opening on every corner, and at the same time the bubbling dot-coms were luring editorial talent away from print and into digital publishing. Those two factors converged to make life as a Publisher or Acquisitions editor pretty lush for a few years — salaries in the industry went up by over 30% and the enormous competition to sign talent to fill the shelves of all those miles of shelves in those new stores (and that mysterious new thing called Amazon.com too) made way for expense accounts and advance budgets that were unprecedented. That crazy growth, however, was totally unsustainable. Once the dot-com bubble burst, and new stores were no longer coming online, we were left with no new growth, a significant erosion of independent bookstores, consumer trained to expect cheap prices on books, and a overabundance of new “B-level” titles.
High times in publishing! « ConfessionsOfAnITGirl.com (via fluffynotes)
Coffeehouse Junkie 