Milan Sadhwani > Milan's Quotes

“Travel far enough, you meet yourself.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

“The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.”
― Katherine Mansfield

“I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship, was that one had to explain nothing”
― Katherine Mansfield

“In the phrase ' human being,' the word 'being' is much more important than the word 'human.' ”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment. All that remains of my mother is what I remember and what I have written for and about her. Eventually that is all that will remain of [my husband] and me. Writing sometimes feels frivolous and sometimes sacred, but memory is one of my strongest muses. I serve her with my words. So long as people read, those we love survive however evanescently. As do we writers, saying with our life's work, Remember. Remember us. Remember me.”
― Marge Piercy

“The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.”
― Marge Piercy, To Be of Use: Poems

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow

“People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”
― Saul Bellow

“Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.”
― Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

“I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.”
― Saul Bellow

“A writer is a reader moved to emulation.”
― Saul Bellow

“I've discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, "To hell with you.”
― Saul Bellow

“People don't realize how much they are in the grip of ideas. We live among ideas much more than we live in nature.”
― Saul Bellow, Conversations with Saul Bellow

“We are always looking for the book it is necessary to read next.”
― Saul Bellow

“[W]hen you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”
― Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally

“SALLY    Harry, I can’t do this anymore. I am not your consolation prize. Goodbye.”
― Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally

“Ah, it's my longing for whom I might have been that distracts and torments me!”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win. —G. K. Chesterton”
― Samuel Chand, Leadership Pain: The Classroom for Growth

“growth equals change; change equals loss; loss equals pain; so inevitably, growth equals pain.”
― Samuel Chand, Leadership Pain: The Classroom for Growth

“Reluctance to face pain is your greatest limitation. There is no growth without change, no change without loss, and no loss without pain.”
― Samuel Chand, Leadership Pain: The Classroom for Growth

“pain. If you’re not hurting, you’re not leading. Your vision for the future has to be big enough to propel you to face the heartaches and struggles you’ll find along the way.”
― Samuel Chand, Leadership Pain: The Classroom for Growth

“Pain is a part of progress. Anything that grows experiences some pain. If I avoid all pain, I’m avoiding growth.”
― Samuel Chand, Leadership Pain: The Classroom for Growth

“When you interpret your pain as bigger—more important, more threatening, more comprehensive—than your vision, you’ll redefine your vision down to the threshold of your pain.”
― Samuel Chand, Leadership Pain: The Classroom for Growth

“Leadership expert Michael Hyatt reflected on Karnazes’s life and drew three conclusions about why we should embrace discomfort: 1. Comfort is overrated. It doesn’t lead to happiness. It makes us lazy—and forgetful. It often leads to self-absorption, boredom, and discontent. 2. Discomfort can be a catalyst for growth. It makes us yearn for something more. It forces us to change, stretch, and adapt. 3. Discomfort is often a sign we’re making progress. You’ve heard the expression, “no pain, no gain.” It’s true! When you push yourself to grow, you will experience discomfort.”
― Samuel Chand, Leadership Pain: The Classroom for Growth

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
― Edward Abbey, The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
― Charles Dickens

“When the last autumn of Dickens's life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades of our lives in exchange for stacks of paper with scratches and squiggles on them. And when Death calls, how many of us would trade all those pages, all that squandered lifetime-worth of painfully achieved scratches and squiggles, for just one more day, one more fully lived and experienced day? And what price would we writers pay for that one extra day spent with those we ignored while we were locked away scratching and squiggling in our arrogant years of solipsistic isolation?

Would we trade all those pages for a single hour? Or all of our books for one real minute?”
― Dan Simmons, Drood

“In a word, it was impossible for me to separate her, in the past or in the present, from the innermost life of my life.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“Thackeray's a good writer and Flaubert is a great artist. Trollope is a good writer and Dickens is a great artist. Colette is a very good writer and Proust is a great artist. Katherine Anne Porter was an extremely good writer and Willa Cather was a great artist.”
― Truman Capote, Conversations with Capote