Autumn

“Instead of the word 'love' there was an enormous heart, a symbol sometimes used by people who have trouble figuring out the difference between words and shapes.”
― Lemony Snicket, The Carnivorous Carnival

“Your beliefs will be the light by which you see, but they will not be what you see and they will not be a substitute for seeing.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“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

“She says she can’t talk,” Svetlana told me. “She’s a botanist her name is Fernanda, so of course her nickname is Fern. It suits her because ferns are so mysterious and sort of elusive and ferns can survive anywhere.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot