None of us is pure, and purity is a dreary pursuit left to Puritans.”
— Rebecca Solnit, Mysteries of Thoreau, Unsolved (via Austin Kleon)
Tag: Quote
“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)
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)
Do you also have a ‘stop doing’ list?
Most of us lead busy but undisciplined lives. We have ever-expanding ‘to do’ lists, trying to build momentum by doing, doing, doing—and doing more. It rarely works. Those who built the good-to-great companies, however, made as much use of ‘stop doing’ lists as ‘to do’ lists. They displayed a remarkable discipline to unplug all sorts of extraneous junk.”
— Jim Collins, as excerpted from Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t
And all that for the most foolish reason, which, one would think, was hardly worth mentioning: that is, that man everywhere and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated. And one may choose what is contrary to one’s own interests and sometimes one positively ought (that is my idea).”
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
“Talking about our problems is our greatest addiction. Break the habit. Talk about your joys.”
— via swissmiss)
Neither White Nor Male
“Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them, they had set about creating something else to be.”
— Toni Morrison, Sula (via @missberlyreads)
Lisa Marie Blair 