Charlie

“If you can’t discover what’s keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual - "Ishmael”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“And the dark night of flow is an issue that society has not made particularly easy to handle. How many people have stopped playing guitar, writing poetry, or painting watercolors—activities packed with flow triggers—because these are also activities that do not squarely fit into culturally acceptable responsibility categories like “career” or “children”? How many, now grown up and done with childish things, have put away the surfboard, the skateboard, the whatever? How many have made the mistake of conflating the value of the vehicle that leads us to an experience (the surfboard, etc.) with the value of the experience itself (the flow state)?”
― Steven Kotler, The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance

“So often, a visit to a bookshop has cheered me, and reminded me that there are good things in the world.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“Theo thought he knew the answer: Vincent was the victim of his own fanatic heart. “There’s something in the way he talks that makes people either love him or hate him,” he tried to explain. “He spares nothing and no one.” Long after others had put away the breathless manias of youth, Vincent still lived by their unsparing rules. Titanic, unappeasable passions swept through his life. “I am a fanatic!” Vincent declared in 1881. “I feel a power within me … a fire that I may not quench, but must keep ablaze.”
― Steven Naifeh, Van Gogh