Tag: quotes

439 posts since July 2010 RSS

  • December 14th, 2012 3:45pm

    Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.

    —

    Walter Cronkite (via thelifeguardlibrarian)

    Too bad we’re already there. 

  • December 13th, 2012 6:17pm

    ‘No philosopher has ever influenced the attitudes of even the street he lived on,’ Voltaire was reputed to have said. That’s not what I believe. With deep winter upon us and the weather growing colder, even the wood smoke out of the neighbors’ chimneys could be described as philosophizing. I can see it move its lips as it rises, telling the indifferent sky about our loneliness, the torment of our minds and passions which we keep secret from each other, and the wonder and pain of our mortality and of our eventual vanishing from this earth. It’s a kind of deep, cathedral-like quiet that precedes a snowfall. One looks with amazement at the bare trees, the gray daylight making its slow retreat across the bare fields, and inevitably recalls that Emily Dickinson poem in which she speaks of just such a winter afternoon—windless and cold, when an otherworldly light falls and shadows hold their breath—and of the hurt that it gives us for which we can find no scar, only a closer peek inside ourselves where the meanings and all the unanswered questions are.

    —

    Charles Simic, “Winter’s Philosophers”, on NYRBlog

    Only a writer with the uncommon grace of Simic could have written something so slamdunkingly resonant regarding the onset of these now unavoidable winter afternoons and manage to namecheck effortlessly not just Voltaire and Dickinson, as in this passage, but earlier also Dovlatov, Cioran, Plato, Socrates, Pascal, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Marx, Wittgenstein, Boethius, everyone, no one, all of us.

    (via classicpenguin)

  • December 11th, 2012 5:06am

    What I try to teach young actors – the best thing they can learn is to identify well-written material. The writing in our industry, in a story, is the most important element, bar none. It is always about the writing first.

    So what I’ve been able to do – the thing I’m good at, really, is to identify well written material. Now that doesn’t mean the product is going to end up that way. It’s a recipe – and sometimes it doesn’t work – and you’re thinking, ‘oh well, wait a minute, I had all the ingredients, how did this happen?’ That’s going to happen.

    But if you start with something that has good writing, you at least have a shot. If you start with something that is not well written, you have no shot of making something good. The best actor in the world can make “C” level material “C+” level material. Maybe “B-”, that’s it.

    — Bryan Cranston

  • December 11th, 2012 5:05am


    queen-angelina:

    “Anytime I feel lost, I pull out a map and stare. I stare until I have reminded myself that life is a giant adventure, so much to do, to see.”

  • December 11th, 2012 4:09am

    Most people were heartless about turtles because a turtle’s heart will beat for hours after it has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too.

    — Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (via thepaintedbench)

  • December 7th, 2012 11:56pm

    The process of writing a chapter for me is no different from writing any other song; except if I get caught up in a rhyme, with “Trapped in the Closet,” I usually have to go find some clothes to bring that character out of me. Say, for instance, if I get stuck on what Pimp Lucious is gonna say, what his actions are gonna be, I would usually go and get a tight suit and some tacky clothes and put a wig on and get some glasses and a cane, and walk around the studio until I feel like I am Pimp Lucious. Once I put the clothes on and get all up into character, the thing that he’s supposed to say usually comes to me, and I can proceed along with the process.

    —

    R. Kelly, on writing. (via twiststreet)

    yeah, this is pretty much my approach to writing as well

    (via marksable)

  • December 7th, 2012 11:05pm

    mfstrange:

    “I was sentimental about many things: a woman’s shoes under the bed; one hairpin left behind on the dresser; the way they said, “I’m going to pee..”’ hair ribbons; walking down the boulevard with them at 1:30 in the afternoon, just two people walking together; the long nights of drinking and smoking; talking; the arguments; thinking of suicide; eating together and feeling good; the jokes; the laughter out of nowhere; feeling miracles in the air; being in a parked car together; comparing past loves at 3am; being told you snore; hearing her snore; mothers, daughters, sons, cats, dogs; sometimes death and sometimes divorce; but always carrying on, always seeing it through; reading a newspaper alone in a sandwich joint and feeling nausea because she’s now married to a dentist with an I.Q. of 95; racetracks, parks, park picnics; even jails; her dull friends; your dull friends; your drinking, her dancing; your flirting, her flirting; her pills, your fucking on the side and her doing the same; sleeping together.” 

    -Charles Bukowski, Women

  • December 7th, 2012 10:32pm

    I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone.

    — Robin Williams  (via sofiesfatale)

  • December 6th, 2012 11:13pm

    You have to remember, in the entire history of the universe, you’re the only you that has ever existed. Only you see the world the way you see the world. We want to know how you see it. It might be so beautiful, so different, that it changes everything.

    — Grant Morrison, 2008 (via deantrippe)

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