“My favorite authors are the ones living, dead, read and unread, published and unpublished, who write because they can’t stop and because something inside them burns to be outside. That doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to read their books, but they are all and every one my favorites.”
Category: quote
“My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus.”
— Stephen Hawking, The Science of Second-Guessing (New York Times Magazine Interview, December 12, 2004)
Life isn’t a support system for the art. It’s the other way around.
— Stephen King – On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft
We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood — it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, “Too late.
— Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“If you lay hands on today, you will find you are less dependent on tomorrow. While you delay, life speeds on by.
Every thing we have belongs to others, Lucilius; time alone is ours. Nature has put us in possession of this one thing, this fleeting, slippery thing – and anyone who wants to can dispossess us.”
— Seneca (4 BC – AD 65), Moral Letters to Lucilius (1.1)
A little girl was in a drawing lesson. [The teacher] said, “What are you drawing?” And the girl said, “I’m drawing a picture of God.” And the teacher said, “But nobody knows what God looks like.” And the girl said, “They will in a minute.”
— Sir Ken Robinson
“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body…”
— Walt Whitman, preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855
All change is for the better.
“All change is change for the better. There is no such thing as “change for the worse.” Change is the process of Life Itself, and that process could be called by the name “evolution.” And evolution moves in only one direction: forward, and toward improvement. Therefore, when change visits your life, you can be sure things are turning for the better. It may not look that way in the very moment change arrives, but if you will wait a while and have faith in the process, you will see that this is true.”
— Neale Donald Walsch
Being on Twitter felt like being in a nonconsensual BDSM relationship with the apocalypse. So, I left.
Lindy West — I Quit Twitter and It Feels Great
If the young are not initiated into the village – they will burn it down just to feel its warmth.
— African proverb