Lorriane

“Her lips remind me of kite strings and I find myself thinking about panda bears. Panda bears do not fly kites, I tell myself.

'I thought you were dead,' she says.

Maybe if you taped a kite to a panda paw and scared the panda so that it started running, the kite might start to lift off.”
― Michael Ian Black, You're Not Doing It Right: Tales of Marriage, Sex, Death, and Other Humiliations

“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

“You think intelligence and grit can succeed by themselves, but I'm telling you that's a pretty illusion.”
― Nancy Kress, Steal Across the Sky

“She was looking for something I could never give her." Again his dark eyes bored into Julia's mind. "You have something of the same about you, young woman. Take my advice: Don't think you will find it in another person. You won't. It's not there. You must find it in yourself.”
― Iain Pears, The Dream of Scipio