Alyssa Miller > Recent Status Updates

ACUPUNCTURE FOR SIMPLE SURGERIES SUCH AS APPENDECTOMIES I CANNOT 😳☠️

DUDE.

“We should have conversations, real and imaginary, with translators handy so that everybody might understand everything we say. We may feel native to where we are, or feel displaced, or both, the way someone going on a journey is also a stranger in town, but nevertheless we should keep reading.”

“We must try, all of us, a lot of the time, our best, and we must keep trying. We do not understand anything but we should try our best to understand each other. We should swim and walk in parks, thinking. We should watch movies and think about what might happen. We should buy food and think about where it comes from, and we should listen to music and wonder what it means.”

“…the history of literature is the history of bewilderment. Writers all over the world and all across history have been bewildered by the world and all the things in it they cannot imagine, which is why they are— we are— writing them down, to try and imagine them.”

“‘Countless writers express countless ideas on so many bits of paper, and at some unknown moment some specific book, even some specific sentence, will be the right one for the right person. We never know when some scrap of literature will have its finest hour.’
‘So what do we do?’ I asked …
‘We keep reading,’ the librarian said firmly.”

“It is difficult for me to exaggerate how much I love a library. It is not impossible, of course, because I am a writer, and writers can exaggerate anything.”

"Zeno was an ancient Greek philosopher who ended up being tortured by people who didn't like his ideas. Nowadays philosophers are hardly ever tortured, because most people ignore them completely, and it's hard to say which is the worse fate for philosophy and the people who practice it, being tortured or being ignored."

“I like to think of my finest hour as an actual hour in which I am at my most true and good. I don’t know when this hour is, whether it is in my future or if it went by unnoticed in my past, but I keep watch for those sixty shiny minutes. I know they are somewhere.”

“It is a description I admire very much…so startling that you know no one else has thought of it before the author did, & yet so perfectly clear that you wonder why you never thought of it yourself. All good writing is like this. It is why a favorite book feels like an old friend & a new acquaintance at the same time, & the reason a favorite author can be a familiar figure & a mysterious stranger all at once.”

“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” - William Morris

“If we consider and care for each object that we keep, we become producers of meaning rather than consumers of goods.”

Hygge is a celebration of the spontaneous & honest, a step toward a life that is real & uncontrived. It can’t be summoned by the arrangement of a perfect scene or engineered by a carefully styled table. [Its] essence is contained in the seeds of our intentions & will flourish or wither according to how generously those seeds are planted.. It often thrives in the unpredictable & imperfect conditions on the margins.

“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss — an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. — is sure to be noticed.” - Søren Kierkegaard