Leisel The Spacemercat Sempf > Leisel's Quotes

“I think that you’ve got to make something that pleases you and hope that other people feel the same way.”
― Thomas Keller

“Cooking is not about convenience and it's not about shortcuts. Our hunger for the twenty-minute gourmet meal, for one-pot ease and prewashed, precut ingredients has severed our lifeline to the satisfactions of cooking. Take your time. Take a long time. Move slowly and deliberately and with great attention.”
― Thomas Keller, The French Laundry Cookbook

“When you acknowledge, as you must, that there is no such thing as perfect food, only the idea of it, then the real purpose of striving toward perfection becomes clear: to make people happy, that is what cooking is all about.”
― Thomas Keller, The French Laundry Cookbook

“When we eat together, when we set out to do so deliberately, life is better, no matter what your circumstances.”
― Thomas Keller, Ad Hoc at Home

“Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?”
― Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“Creativity is an act of defiance.”
― Twyla Tharp

“Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.”
― Twyla Tharp

“I read for growth, firmly believing that what you are today and what you will be in five years depends on two things: the people you meet and the books you read.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“You may wonder which came first: the skill or the hard work. But that's a moot point. The Zen master cleans his own studio. So should you.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“A lot of habitually creative people have preparation rituals linked to the setting in which they choose to start their day. By putting themselves into that environment, they start their creative day.

The composer Igor Stravinsky did the same thing every morning when he entered his studio to work: He sat at the piano and played a Bach fugue. Perhaps he needed the ritual to feel like a musician, or the playing somehow connected him to musical notes, his vocabulary. Perhaps he was honoring his hero, Bach, and seeking his blessing for the day. Perhaps it was nothing more than a simple method to get his fingers moving, his motor running, his mind thinking music. But repeating the routine each day in the studio induced some click that got him started.

In the end, there is no ideal condition for creativity. What works for one person is useless for another. The only criterion is this: Make it easy on yourself. Find a working environment where the prospect of wrestling with your muse doesn't scare you, doesn't shut you down. It should make you want to be there, and once you find it, stick with it. To get the creative habit, you need a working environment that's habit-forming. All preferred working states, no matter how eccentric, have one thing in common: When you enter into them, they compel you to get started.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“If you're at a dead end, take a deep breath, stamp your foot, and shout "Begin!" You never know where it will take you.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“I'm in a room with the obligation to create a major dance piece. The dancers will be here in a few minutes. What are we going to do?

To some people, this empty room symbolizes something profound, mysterious, and terrifying: the task of starting with nothing and working your way toward creating something whole and beautiful and satisfying... Some people find this moment - the moment before creativity begins - so painful that they simply cannot deal with it. They get up and walk away from he computer, the canvas, the keyboard; they take a nap or go shopping or fix lunch or do chores around the house. They procrastinate. In its most extreme form, this terror totally terrorizes people.

The blank space can be humbling. But I've faced it my whole professional life. It's my job. It's also my calling. Bottom line: Filling this empty space constitutes my identity.”
― Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

“There comes a time when the body takes over the life. There comes a time when the body’s urges, the body’s needs,
dictate the life. You have no idea you are giving the body the key. But you hand it over. And then it’s in control. You mess with the wiring and the wiring takes charge.”
― David Levithan, Every Day

“I love you,” she says.
“I love you,” I say.
And then we hang up, because nothing else needs to be said after that.
I want to give Zara her life back. Even if I feel I deserve something like this, I don’t deserve it at her expense.”
― David Levithan, Every Day

“He’ll have to prove it to you. Every day, he’ll have to prove he’s worthy of
you. And if he doesn’t, that’s it. But I think he will.”
― David Levithan, Every Day

“We come to a corner where there are a few people protesting the festivities. I don't understand this at all. It's like protesting the fact that some people are red-haired.

In my experience, desire is desire, love is love. I have never fallen in love with a gender. I have fallen for individuals. I know this is hard for people to do, but I don't understand why it's so hard, when it's so obvious.”
― David Levithan, Every Day

“You know what happens to girls who loves lost boys? They become lost themselves.”
― David Levithan, Every Day

“Reading is not life. Reading is creating life in your head. And that can only help you so much in a storm.”
― David Levithan, Every Day

“Some people think mental illness is a matter of mood, a matter of personality. They think depression is simply a form of being sad, that OCD is a form of being uptight. They think the soul is sick, not the body. It is, they believe, something that you have some choice over. I know how wrong it is.”
― David Levithan, Every Day

“How did you know it was me?' I have to ask.
'The way you looked at me,' she says, 'It couldn't have been anyone else.”
― David Levithan, Every Day

“The knowledge that the atoms that comprise life on earth - the atoms that make up the human body, are traceable to the crucibles that cooked light elements into heavy elements in their core under extreme temperatures and pressures. These stars- the high mass ones among them- went unstable in their later years- they collapsed and then exploded- scattering their enriched guts across the galaxy- guts made of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and all the fundamental ingredients of life itself. These ingredients become part of gas clouds that condense, collapse, form the next generation of solar systems- stars with orbiting planets. And those planets now have the ingredients for life itself. So that when I look up at the night sky, and I know that yes we are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up- many people feel small, cause their small and the universe is big. But I feel big because my atoms came from those stars.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson