A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.
Tag: quotes
So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.
Basing your friendships on what people have to offer, vs. what you want from them, can make them closer than they’ve ever been.
The most adult decisions in your life are ones that put severe limits on other possibilities.
Penelope Trunk. Filed under: decisions.
I’m not very interested in political satire because it works on the assumption that They Are Assholes. Fiction works on the assumption that They Are Us, on a Different Day.
George Saunders. Re-tumbling this part of a really good interview because it’s an election year. Just doing my part for America.
The point isn’t to achieve everything, just to pay respects to one or two of the things one suspects oneself capable of.
Alain de Botton. Filed under: success.
That was the idiot hopefulness of humans, always to love what was unformed.
Chad Harbach in The Art of Fielding. Cf. John Cage:
I am frankly embarrassed that most of my musical life has been spent in the search for new materials. The significance of new materials is that they represent, I believe, the incessant desire in our culture to explore the unknown. Before we know the unknown, it inflames our hearts. When we know it, the flame dies down, only to burst forth again at the thought of a new unknown. This desire has found expression in our culture in new materials, because our culture has its faith not in the peaceful center of the spirit but in an ever-hopeful projection onto things of our own desire for completion.
We expect too much from January and not enough from February.
@mlarson, aka me. I think I’m on to something here.
Don’t be dour about it. Straight gay black white young old–it’s not going to kill you or let you live.
We know the cruelest of fanatics by their exceptionally clear consciences.
I owe my livelihood to technology and I love the raw capability it offers us as a tool, but I fear it a bit more than most people do. It’s a tool, but it’s not quite a hammer, because a hammer doesn’t seduce you into sitting around lonely in your underwear for 6 hours at a stretch.
I’m almost annoyed when something I’ve been interested in becomes valuable. Then it becomes trouble. I have to take care of it.
I was always somebody. I was famous at the Chevron. I’ve had some trials that would have made the average motherfucker jump out a window a long time ago, but if you wake up one morning and say, ‘I can’t do it no more,’ then it’s all over. That’s why I wake up every morning and say, let’s do this shit. Let’s get it.
Young Jeezy on staying optimistic. (via howtotalktogirlsatparties). And don’t forget:
I don’t give a fuck if you’re doin’ petty shit or big shit. […] Get your motherfuckin’ money and make other people’s lives better.
I have saved the world so many times in video games that lately I have felt a kind of resentful Republicanism creep into my game-playing mind: Can’t these fucking people take care of themselves?
Tom Bissell in Extra Lives, which you should read.
Do your work for six years; but in the seventh, go into solitude or among strangers, so that the memory of your friends does not hinder you from being what you have become.
Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person. One other person you can trust, one other person to whom you can unfold your soul. One other person you feel safe enough with to allow you to acknowledge things—to acknowledge things to yourself—that you otherwise can’t. Doubts you aren’t supposed to have, questions you aren’t supposed to ask.
The American Scholar: Solitude and Leadership – William Deresiewicz. First sentence.
One purpose of children is to shred parental black-and-whites into gray confetti.
When you’re in denial about how invested you are in a single outcome, that’s when unrealistic expectations creep in.
Uncouple your own grief from the hopes you pin on others. All relationships stand alone; there are no replacements.
They say you only live once but every time I come to work I feel like I’m starting a second life.
Kanye West on the transformative power of creative endeavors.
Mark Larson 