“For me, writing is really just learning about things that interest me, and then trying to convince you to find them as interesting as I do.”
— Susan Orlean (via Austen Kleon)
Category: Commonplace
Quotes, art, questions, videos, podcasts, music, and whatever else inspires.
“Hey, insular cortex, that does disgusting food… ‘Moral disgust’? I don’t know, that vaguely sounds sort of like that. Hey, somebody give me some duct tape. I’m going to strap moral disgust onto gustatory disgust.”
We mistake feeling disgusted by something as being a good litmus test for deciding what’s right and wrong. And what we know is somebody’s “disgusting, this is simply wrong” is somebody else’s “perfectly normal loving lifestyle”. And it’s tempting if your stomach is in a total uproar, you know, “if it makes you puke you must rebuke”.
“Why are potential overlaps between recreational and therapeutic often discredited? Can’t recreation be therapeutic in some cases too?”
— Erica Avey, Question
Through Suffering
“On our earth we can only love with suffering and through suffering. We cannot love otherwise, and we know of no other sort of love. I want suffering in order to love.”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have ‘an ambition of transcendence.’”
— Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth
Non-being/Being
“Every day includes much more non-being than being.”
— Virginia Woolf, from “A Sketch of the Past,” Moments of Being
“Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.”
— Donald Winnicott, psychoanalyst (via Dana Levin)
Lisa Marie Blair 