Syd Markle

“The way you ask for criticism and react when you get it goes a long way toward building trust—or destroying it.”
― Kim Malone Scott, Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

“Georgia O’Keeffe said, “It is only by selection, by elimination, and by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things.” Choosing what to select, what to eliminate, and what to emphasize depends not only on the idea but on the audience.”
― Kim Malone Scott, Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity

“It is possible for a writer to make, or remake at least, for a reader, the primary pleasures of eating, or drinking, or looking on, or sex. Novels have their obligatory tour-de-force, the green-flecked gold omelette aux fines herbes, melting into buttery formlessness and tasting of summer, or the creamy human haunch, firm and warm, curved back to reveal a hot hollow, a crisping hair or two, the glimpsed sex. They do not habitually elaborate on the equally intense pleasure of reading. There are obvious reasons for this, the most obvious being the regressive nature of the pleasure, a mise-en-abîme even, where words draw attention to the power and delight of words, and so ad infinitum, thus making the imagination experience something papery and dry, narcissistic and yet disagreeably distanced, without the immediacy of sexual moisture or the scented garnet glow of a good burgundy. And yet, natures such as Roland's are at their most alert and heady when reading is violently yet steadily alive. (What an amazing word "heady" is, en passant, suggesting both acute sensuous alertness and its opposite, the pleasure of the brain as opposed to the viscera—though each is implicated in the other, as we know very well, with both, when they are working.)”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession

“For my true thoughts have spent more time in your company than in anyone else's, these last two or three months, and where my thoughts are, there am I, in truth".”
― A.S. Byatt, Possession