Lisa Marie Blair

Tag: Quote

  • 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.”

    — bell hooks, All About Love

  • Above an Abyss

    “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

    — Vladamir Nabokov (via WeCroak)

  • Vantage Point

    “‘If you can see a thing whole,’ he said, ‘it seems that it’s always beautiful. Planets, lives…But close up, a world’s all dirt and rocks. And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful earth is, is to see it from the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.’”

    ― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

  • All Human Behavior

    “The way of the miracle-worker is to see all human behavior as one two things: either love, or a call for love”

    — Marianne Williamson

  • I Feel No Spiritual Void

    “I have never, in all my life, not for one moment, been tempted toward religion of any kind. The fact is that I feel no spiritual void. I have my philosophy of life, which does not include any aspect of the supernatural and which I find totally satisfying. I am, in short, a rationalist and believe only that which reason tells me is so.”

    ― Isaac Asimov, I, Asimov: A Memoir

  • All Is

    “All is linked, all is consequence.”

    —Jean-Luc Godard, Alphaville

  • The Activation Is Ongoing

    — Brandon Shimoda, “When It’s Naked“

  • Simply State

    If only it were possible to simply state these feelings without insisting on them, without making an argument or a dogma out of them!”

    — Zadie Smith, Intimations: Six Essays

  • The Woman Who Told the Truth

    “The story of Cassandra, the woman who told the truth but was not believed, is not nearly as embedded in our culture as that of the Boy Who Cried Wolf—that is, the boy who was believed the first few times he told the same lie. Perhaps it should be.”

    — Rebecca Solnit, “Cassandra Among the Creeps“

  • Evil Committed by Nobodies

    The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.”

    — Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment

  • Constructive Use of Anxiety

    The capacity to bear anxiety is important for the individual’s self-realization and for his conquest of his environment. Every person experiences continual shocks and threats to his existence; indeed, self-actualization occurs only at the price of moving ahead despite such shocks. This indicates the constructive use of anxiety.”

    — Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety (via The School of Anxiety is The School of Greatness)

  • The True Hard Work of Love

    Love is something we have to learn and we can make progress with, and that it’s not just an enthusiasm, it’s a skill. And it requires forbearance, generosity, imagination, and a million things besides. The course of true love is rocky and bumpy at the best of times, and the more generous we can be towards that flawed humanity, the better chance we’ll have of doing the true hard work of love.”

    — Alain de Botton, “The True Hard Work of Love and Relationships“, On Being with Krista Tippett