Paige

“Plain words on plain paper. Remember what Orwell says, that good prose is like a windowpane. Cut every page you write by at least a third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blood. Give up your social life and don't think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink; that will cure you of persiflage! But do I take my own advice? Not a bit. Persiflage is my nom de guerre. (Don't use foreign expressions. It's elitist.)”
― Hilary Mantel

“Every happy man should have some one with a little hammer at his door to knock and remind him that there are unhappy people, and that, however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show its claws, and some misfortune will befall him -- illness, poverty, loss, and then no one will see or hear him, just as he now neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer, and the happy go on living, just a little fluttered with the petty cares of every day, like an aspen-tree in the wind -- and everything is all right.”
― Anton Chekhov, Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov

“If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so… The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.”
― Alan Watts

“Today, the most resonant ideas are not those that get flashed at the highest number of people but those that become individualized expressions of affiliation and identity among peers.”
― Jeremy Heimans, New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World—and How to Make It Work for You