A question I like to ask when I travel: “What would I be like if I grew up here?”
Dan Wang. I’ve been thinking about this for a while.
Tag: quotes
Resentment might start with a wrong that’s done to you, but harboring it in silence is a wrong you do to others.
Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.
To discard the stuff we’ve acquired is to murder the version of ourselves we envision using it.
Laura Miller in Marie Kondo Will Help You Tidy Your House, Embrace Your Mortality. Cleaning up is hard to do, y’all.
The piles of stuff we might need someday are an argument that we will always be around to need them. The plans to revisit those photos and take up again that course of study, the books we fully intend to finally read assure us that there will be enough time to do so. Mementos presume the ongoing existence of a rememberer. Yes, all of that is a lie, but it’s a necessary lie. And all the joy in the world can’t really compensate for having to let that go.
Cf. “Our unlived lives…”
Getting along isn’t luck, it’s a skill.
Informal language is the athletic clothing of ideas.
The restriction of trailers to a few minutes of carefully selected and edited shots and scenes endows what we do see, from faces to car crashes, with a kind of pregnancy or underdeterminacy that allows audiences to create an imaginary (as-yet-unseen) film out of these fragments—we desire not the real film but the film we want to see.
Lisa Kernan, quoted in Matt Thomas’ The Following Post Has Been Approved for All Audiences.
Internet writers live on Twitter and it greatly distorts their understanding of reality.
As someone who loves Twitter, this can be hard to admit, but ultimately Twitter is an ephemeral online forum that nobody really uses, and our tiny politics subpocket of Twitterdom almost certainly has no effect on anything.
Friendship is not a pale imitation of sexual romance. It is a romance unto itself.
The first draft is always perfect. perfect. Its only job is to exist.
The best way to “educate yourself,” for most people at most stages in your life, is to make marginal adjustments in your peer group.
I’d never had to sit and try to think about exactly what I meant by each thing I was saying, because normally, I had written it. And so honestly, what I tried to do was picture what an actor I admired would do, and I copied that. And that is the absolute truth. I imagined what somebody would do if they were given this part, and then I did all of those things.
The best way to communicate your needs clearly is to trust them, vs. spinning them in the most favorable way or second-guessing your own normalcy.
I see life as like being attacked by a bear. You can run, you can pretend to be dead, or you can make yourself bigger.
Photography would seem to preserve our past and make it invulnerable to the distortions of repeated memorial superimpositions, but I think that is a fallacy: photographs supplant the past and corrupt our memories.
Sally Mann, Hold Still (via austinkleon)
What I learned from Prince and Muhammad Ali was that it’s possible to love yourself so much that everyone else does, too.
I feel at ease with whatever will come, not because I am strong but because this is a part of life.
Angelina Jolie Pitt, Stoic philosopher. Filed under: acceptance.
I’ve had my dictaphone since the mid- to late ’90s. In my previous life, I used to record demos on it. Then I ran into some trouble with tendonitis and repetitive stress and it prevented me from writing at my laptop. I got really bummed about it, so I started speaking my scripts out into this dictaphone I had lying around. I realized it was really helpful for my creative process. Having a linear writing machine, where I couldn’t go back and hate myself and edit myself, allowed me to blast through drafts of scripts much more quickly and write from a much more instinctual, as opposed to intellectual, place. It’s a mess when it comes out, but the pacing is really good. So I have Radio Shack to thank for my entire creative process.
Mark Duplass. (via). And also:
For the first time in my life, I’m starting to make more money than I know what to do with. And it’s really weird. What it does is it kind of kills your god. Because your god, as an artist, is to try to find a way to make the art you want to make while being financially sustainable. And to have achieved that murdered my god. So now I look to Warren Buffett — the way he’s still actively excited about achieving career success and making money, and then he throws it all away on people who need it. That is the most inspiring thing that I can imagine.
Grief is as unique as a fingerprint.
Give your past, present and future selves influence in proportion to what each has earned. Which one of you is working with the most reliable information — about you and nobody else?
Mark Larson 