Noah > Recent Status Updates

“Mastery of the genre is essential for yet one more reason: Screenwriting is not for sprinters, but for long distance runners…..Genre should be a constant source if reinspiration….of all the reasons for wanting to write, the only one that nurtures is through time is love of the work itself” - pg. 98-99.

“Humor is one means the therapist can use to try to break this grim mood, hoping to wake the family out of their hypnotic trance where all is desperation and struggle” - pg. 112

“For a while, we were social, that process of reassuring ourselves that we could be casual with one another, a ritual protection from the intensity that was to follow and perhaps a necessary prelude to it” - pg 12

Even small talk on the way to a session can be a way of reassuring a nervous participant - “It’s not going to be so scary, there’s always emotional safety available”.

“The cost of your good habits are in the present, the cost of your bad habits are in the future”.

"The nights were so brief and the days so warm, they dried out quickly and napped in the leaf-filtered sunlight, drowsing in the warmth, contented and lazy as dogs by firelight" - pg. 227

Faced with the Divine, people took refuge in the banal, as though answering a cosmic multiple choice question : If you saw a burning bush would you (a) call 911, (b) get the hot dogs, or (c) recognize God? - pg. 119

“In filterworld, it becomes hard to separate the nature of something, or its reality, from its popularity in terms of attention. Popularity alone often gets confused for meaning and significance.” - 121

There is now a generic global consumer, whose preferences and desires are molded more by the platforms they use then where they live. In some cases, we conduct our lives more in the space of [platforms] than in the [geographical space in which we live]. Along with our world, we are now flat, too. - 104

“Algorithmic anxiety is something of a contemporary plague…there’s an emotional fallout to this quest for attention: we end up both overstimulated and numb, much like glassy eyes slots player waiting for matching symbols to come up.” - 40

“Quality is subjective. Data alone, in the absence of human judgment, can only go so far in gauging it.”

“ it’s a classic rule and film. Many of the best cinematic moments happen by accident. A scene tried that doesn’t work when first tried will ultimately tell you what does work.

Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.”

“Where do we get the idea of perfection from anyway? It comes from how we perceive how the outside world perceives us relative to others. In other words: perfection paralysis comes from comparing yourselves to others…

Just let some of your output be bad. At least you’ll be working, And that means you’ll be improving.… The professionals are the ones who keep going back to their plate and working it”

“So it is a rejection of the reality of Grace to hold her enemy at fault. Those things can only be true. It seems to me people tend to forget that we are to love our enemies, not to satisfy some standard of righteousness, but because God their father loves them.”

"I have thought about that very often – how the times change, and the same words that carry a good many people in the howling wilderness in one generation are irksome and meaningless in the next"

And often enough, when we think we are protecting ourselves, we are struggling against our rescuer.

I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness.

“When things are taking their ordinary course, it is hard to remember what matters”

People talk about how wonderful the world seems to children, and that’s true enough. But children think they will grow into it and understand it, and I know very well that I will not, and would not if I had a dozen lives. That’s clearer to me every day.

“Sometimes I have loved the peacefulness of an ordinary Sunday. It is like standing in a newly planted garden after a warm rain. You can feel the silent and invisible life. All it needs from you is that you take care not to trample on it.”