Autumn

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
― Ira Glass

“Cities were in her bones. Her fellow passengers could complain of smuts and smells, of the incredible chaos of carriages and wagons, but Eliza enjoyed her glimpses of a Mayfair wedding, a woman hitting another woman with a broom on the Charing Cross Road and a band of Ethiopian minstrels outside Westminster.”
― Zadie Smith, The Fraud

“We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
― Carson McCullers

“As an evangelical teenager, I didn't trust my own mind, too afraid to sin. Straying too far away from the early Christian internet could lead to temptation, to lust, to anger, to doubt. Perpetually aware of my own failings and ever the budding perfectionist, I aspired to a nearly ascetic level of spiritual self-discipline, which was in fact self-denial. I believe that I had chosen my faith for myself, not realizing that I had been conditioned all my life to be the ideal, obedient subject.”
― Jeanna Kadlec, Heretic: A Memoir