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#1

“I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.”
― James Michener

tags: writing

1339 likes

#2

“And, if you'll investigate the history of science, my dear boy, I think you'll find that most of the really big ideas have come from intelligent playfulness. All the sober, thin-lipped concentration is really just a matter of tidying up around the fringes of the big ideas.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Armageddon in Retrospect

tags: big-ideas, history, history-of-science, ideas, intelligent-playfulness, science

6 likes

#3

“in skies of deepening blue
the moon, heaven's queen
was now afloat”
― Colm Tóibín

32 likes

#4

“But, she knew, you didn’t have to marry your soulmate, and you didn’t even have to marry an Interesting. You didn’t always need to be the dazzler, the firecracker, the one who cracked everyone up, or made everyone want to sleep with you, or be the one who wrote and starred in the play that got the standing ovation. You could cease to be obsessed with the idea of being interesting.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings

tags: change, soulmate

119 likes

#5

“I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

2984 likes

#6

“When someone won't let you in, eventually you stop knocking.”
― Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

1838 likes

#7

“Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven't committed.”
― Anthony Powell

64 likes

#8

“It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.”
― Anthony Powell

28 likes

#9

“There is, after all, no pleasure like that given by a woman who really wants to see you.”
― Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World

tags: humorous, insightful, poignant

25 likes

#10

“Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.”
― Anthony Powell

tags: creative, imagination, writing

25 likes

#11

“A bugler sounded the Last Post. Heartbreak made audible.”
― Nuala O'Faolain, Are You Somebody?: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman

4 likes

#12

“George sat on his porch, and drank his Coke and made daydreams out of the rain. He wondered about the book he would write this year, and he wondered - not too desperately - whether love would find him at last and let him rest for a time. But he smiled all the while he was thinking about it, because at the core he was happy enough just to be alive and watching the storm, and this one thing made him special.”
― Matt Ruff, Fool on the Hill

10 likes

#13

“When you write, you believe in something no one else can see. You spend lots of time committed to a project for which there are no assurances, no guarantees. Being a writer subjects you to the same doubts, the same unpopularity, the same nagging questions that believers struggle with. Writing is communing with the unseen…”
― Heather Sellers, Chapter After Chapter: Discover the Dedication and Focus You Need to Write the Book of Your Dreams

23 likes

#14

“Writing a book is exactly like love. You don’t hold back. You give it everything you have. If it doesn’t work out, you’re heartbroken, but you move forward and start again anyway. You have to.
You don’t hold some of yourself in reserve. It’s all or nothing. There are no guarantees. ”
― Heather Sellers, Chapter After Chapter: Discover the Dedication and Focus You Need to Write the Book of Your Dreams

16 likes

#15

“When the war (WWI) finally ended it was necessary for both sides to maintain, indeed even to inflate, the myth of sacrifice so that the whole affair would not be seen for what it was: a meaningless waste of millions of lives. Logically, if the flower of youth had been cut down in Flanders, the survivors were not the flower: the dead were superior to the traumatized living. In this way, the virtual destruction of a generation further increased the distance between the old and the young, between the official and the unofficial.”
― Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New

tags: glory, sacrifice, waste, wwi

9 likes

#16

“In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.”
― Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New

tags: art, industrialization, language, wwi

22 likes

#17

“The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.”
― Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New

tags: art-by-committee, auteur, auteur-theory, commitees, consensus

59 likes

#18

“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize."

[Modernism's Patriarch (Time Magazine, June 10, 1996)]”
― Robert Hughes

tags: art, artists, cezanne, confidence, creative-process, depression, depression-humor, doubt, fame, fame-and-fortune, great-art, great-artist, greatness, humility, insecurity, introspection, narcissism, paul-cezanne, self-awareness, self-delusion, self-doubt, self-doubts, self-esteem, self-esteem-or-lack-thereof

447 likes

#19

“Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre”
― Robert Hughes

tags: american-idol-audition, confidence, dunning-kruger-effect, kanye-west, mediocre-minds, mediocre-people, mediocrity, narcissism, self-esteem-movement

71 likes

#20

“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.”
― Robert Hughes

tags: writing, writing-advice, writing-life

14 likes

#21

“She should have done science, not spent all her time with her head in novels. Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

tags: books, life

349 likes

#22

“It wasn't that [he] believed in religion, or a God, or an afterlife. He just knew it was impossible to feel this much love and for it to end.”
― Kate Atkinson, Case Histories

29 likes

#23

“One guy, seeing that I was hungry, insisted on buying me a huge lunch and when I thanked him for his kindness, he simply said, 'Pass it on.' I liked this selfless concept - repay me by rewarding someone else entirely with a generous dollop of goodwill.”
― Tony Hawks, Round Ireland with a Fridge

tags: life-philosophy, spiritual

24 likes

#24

“I was beginning to understand how the Irish mentality worked. The more foolish, illogical or surreal one's actions were perceived t be (and mine surely fell into one of these categories), the wider the arms of hospitality were opened in salutation.”
― Tony Hawks, Round Ireland with a Fridge

13 likes

#25

“For me, once I've made a cup of tea I belong somehow. It's like I'm marking out my territory, and anyone attempting to come and make a cup of tea on my patch will be dealt with most severely, more likely than not with a counter attack into their territory and the seizure of their milk cartons and shortbread biscuits.”
― Tony Hawks

5 likes

#26

“But to mourn, that's different. To mourn is to be eaten alive with homesickness for the person.”
― Olive Ann Burns, Cold Sassy Tree

tags: death, family

205 likes

#27

“The land of embarrassment and breakfast.”
― Julian Barnes

tags: britain

18 likes

#28

“Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

tags: books, life

521 likes

#29

“Women scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot

tags: arrogance, fear, men, women

401 likes

#30

“What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

tags: memory, nostalgia

674 likes

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