“when i say i, i mean us
but i’m not sure it’s my place to talk for you”
Tag: Quote
Think of the Person
“When eating a fruit, think of the person who planted the tree.”
— Vietnamese proverb
Facts and Poetry

Thoreau always had two notebooks—one for facts, and the other for poetry. But he had a hard time keeping them apart, as he often found facts more poetic than his poems. They are, he said, translated from the language of the earth into that of the sky. Thoreau knew that the imagination uses facts to fabricate images and even delicate architectures. One summer night, looking up into the sky at a particularly beautiful, scintillating star, he thought perhaps another traveler somewhere else along the coast was, like him, looking up at that same star and said, ‘Of what unsuspected triangles are stars the apex?’”
— Jean Frémon, “Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Gloves”
Me/Not Me
“I cannot know who I am, because I don’t know which part of me is not me.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Being
The Greater the Wave
“The power of an ocean wave is directly related to the speed and duration of the wind that sets it in motion, and to the ‘length of its fetch,’ or the distance from its point of origin. The longer the fetch, the greater the wave. Nothing can stop these long waves. They become visible only at the end, when they rise and break; for most of their fetch the surface of the ocean is undisturbed.”
— Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (via Bryce Wilner)
The Foolishness of God
“We desperately need the foolishness of God.”
— Madeleine L’Engle, A Circle of Quiet (via Csaba Osvath)
Thirteen
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
— George Orwell, 1984
A Mind-Body Problem
“We are gods with anuses.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
Fight Your Way Through
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
— Ira Glass (via swissmiss)
A Clear Definition
“Had I been given a clear definition of love earlier in my life it would not have taken me so long to become a more loving person. Had I shared with others a common understanding of what it means to love it would have been easier to create love.”