Kendall > Kendall's Quotes

“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 its 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

“And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don’t really mean what I’m saying." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: "How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.”
― David Foster Wallace

“I think fiction lends itself to messiness rather than the ideal, and plays well with the ironies surrounding what happens versus what should happen. And yes, I suppose I was interested in that story in the gap between memory itself, the real business of being alive, and the imagination.”
― Colm Tóibín

“In short, if we wish to see anything sensible done about the situation, we will clearly have to do it ourselves.”
― Patricia C. Wrede, Sorcery & Cecelia: or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot

“Listening's reading if you close your eyes. Music's a wood you walk through.”
― David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

“If you can’t state your position in eight words, you don’t have a position. ”
― Seth Godin

“Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference which is an elegant name for ignorance.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“There is no hell after death to which your God can condemn us. We create our own hell here on earth by making the wrong choices. Life is not something that "happens to us" , it's something that we create and shape ourselves......”
― Karin Alvtegen, Shadow

“Nowadays people often talk about happiness. Books are written about it, courses are taught on it, and some us even try to buy it. Feeling has become a right, and we chase after it, convinced that once we have found it, we will also find the solution to all our problems. Not being happy has come to be equated with failure. But what is happiness, after all? Is it possible to be happy each waking minute, day after day, year in and year out? Is it actually something worth striving for? For how can we conceive of our happiness if we have never experienced any pain? Sometime I think that today we have trouble finding happiness because of our deep fear of suffering. Perhaps we have forgotten the lessons that can be learned from our own darkness. Is it not there that we must go sometimes in order eventually to distinguish the light from the stars. To understand the happiness we so assiduously pursue actually feels? A life without sorrow is a symphony without bass notes. Is there anyone who can truthfully claim that he is always happy? I have never met such a person. On the other hand, I have met apparently happy people who said they were content. I looked up the word in the National Encyclopaedia, and it describes the feeling of having obtained or achieved what can reasonably be desired. And when I read that, I thought that perhaps we have gone astray in our pursuit of happiness, that what we should actually be seeking is the ability to feel content. Something has made us believe that it is the rapture of the moment and the ecstatic rush of the senses that leads to happiness, but perhaps it is instead the courage to settle down and dare to be satisfied with what we have.
Shame- Karin Alvtegen”
― Karin Alvtegen, Shadow

“It's true: lives do drift apart for no obvious reason. We're all busy people,we can't spend our time simply trying to stay in touch. The test of a friendship is if it can weather these inevitable gaps.”
― William Boyd, Any Human Heart

“We never love anyone. Not really. We only love our idea of another person. It is some conception of our own that we love. We love ourselves, in fact.”
― William Boyd, Cork

“Tell Lord Brudenell...that he has already given me satisfaction: the satisfaction of having removed the most damned bad tempered and extravagant bitch in the kingdom.”
― Cecil Woodham-Smith

“Almighty God teach you my dear brother...more wit and knowledge than to be taken in by a good for nothing destructive flirt and devil.”
― Cecil Woodham-Smith

“An armed disciplined force is in its essence dangerous to liberty.”
― Cecil Woodham-Smith

“...moderate your desire of producing perfection, temper your eagerness to produce faultless performance...and soften your manners towards those who are subordinate to you...”
― Cecil Woodham-Smith

“There is no giving advice to a young man so much in love.”
― Cecil Woodham-Smith, The Reason Why: The Story of the Fatal Charge of the Light Brigade

“It was not a union which seemed likely to prosper, since its chief characteristics were imprudence, youth and extreme good looks.”
― Cecil Woodham-Smith

“The policemen agreed they were living with a most peculiar fellow. One moment he was reading classical literature in the original French and quoting Tennyson, and the next he would be discussing the best way to blow up a train.”
― Ben MacIntyre, Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal

“What is the use of living if you cannot eat cheese and pickles?”
― Ben MacIntyre, Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory

“Well you stick the dynamite in the keyhole and you don't damage the safe, only sometimes you put a little too much in and blow the safe door up, but other times you're lucky and the safe just comes open.
Thus the scion of a great banking dynasty learned how to rob a bank.”
― Ben MacIntyre, Agent Zigzag: A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal

“Deception is a sort of seduction. In love and war, adultery and espionage, deceit can only succeed if the deceived party is willing, in some way, to be deceived.”
― Ben Macintyre, Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory

“Eccentricity is one of those English traits that look like frailty but mask a concealed strength; individuality disguised as oddity.”
― Ben Macintyre, A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal

“The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.”
― Ben Macintyre, Forgotten Fatherland: The True Story of Nietzsche's Sister and Her Lost Aryan Colony

“The defining feature of this spy would be his falsity. He was a pure figment of imagination, a weapon in war far removed from the traditional battle of bombs and bullets.”
― Ben Macintyre

“As the Battle of Normandy raged, the Germans held fast to the illusion, so carefully planted and now so meticulously sustained, that a great American army under Patton was preparing to pounce and the German forces in the Pas de Calais must remain in place to repel it.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“As the real army plowed through the waves toward Normandy, two more fake convoys were scientifically simulated heading for the Seine and Boulogne by dropping from planes a blizzard of tinfoil, code-named “Window,” which would show up on German radar as two huge flotillas approaching the French coast.”
― Ben Macintyre, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies

“Britain's counterespionage officers saw signs of treachery in everything Ivor Montagu did: they saw it in his friends, his appearance, his opinions, and his behavior. But above all, they saw it in his passionate, and dubious, love of table tennis.”
― Ben Macintyre, Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory

“Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.”
― Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch

“...there are pleasures to be had from books beyond being lightly entertained. There is the pleasure of being challenged; the pleasure of feeling one’s range and capacities expanding; the pleasure of entering into an unfamiliar world, and being led into empathy with a consciousness very different from one’s own; the pleasure of knowing what others have already thought it worth knowing, and entering a larger conversation. (The New Yorker, 13 Aug 2014)”
― Rebecca Mead

“What's your favorite book?' is a question that is usually only asked by children and banking identity-verification services--and favorite isn't, anyway, the right word to describe the relationship a reader has with a particularly cherished book. Most serious readers can point to one book that has a place in their life like the one that 'Middlemarch' has in mine.”
― Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch