Category: Quotes
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May 1st 2025 My card for today is fitting: Nine of Sea reversed I’ve gotten this before and it’s definitely on point. The Mystical Cats Tarot guidebook reads: “Do you believe you deserve happiness? Do you truly believe that the universe holds goodness and joy for you? The unwillingness to express your wishes and set…
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This is from March 5, 2024, but deserved to be revisited today. RJ had an amazing video today about some of his favorite aphorisms. My Top Five – Personal Aphorisms (And Their Origins) by The Flourishing One of them is “Will X thank me for Y?” People tend to have many self-destructive habits and recognizing…
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I participated in the 1000 Words of Summer yearly challenge that novelist Jami Attenberg holds on her CRAFT TALK Substack. While I didn’t participate in the actual community, as it involved being a paid member of her substack, instead of the two week challenge, I completed 30 days of writing at least 1000 words in…
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I have no idea where I got all these quotes from, but here they are. I need to put them somewhere, because they’re fascinating. On a Single Minute: “An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.” On Being Well-Ordered: “Be steady and well-ordered in your life…
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I never finished reading this book and I don’t think I even have my copy anymore. But I feel these quotes are worth sharing for further perusal. On Absurdity: “… as Albert Camus observed, we humans are creatures who spend our lives trying to convince ourselves that our existence is not absurd.” I gave up…
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The book comes with high praise from Anna Howard from Wild Geese. It opens with a lot of praise, too. And that always makes me skeptical, how pushed this book is. But I already like that one of them used the term ‘relationshipping’ over networking. That is a good sign. The quote that opens the…
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The introduction is called “Surviving Usefulness” which is a fascinating title. It begins with this great quote: “Redemption preserves itself in a small crack in a small crack in the continuum of catastrophe.” – Walter Benjamin The whole first paragraph is excellent. I’d copy down the whole thing, because I have things to say every…
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Henry David Thoreau About Wasting Life on Details : “Our life is frittered away by detail.” I believe by this he means details that don’t actually matter, like minutiae and trivia, such as is stuffed into every extra neuron of my poor, rotten brain. On a Deacon’s Personal Effects Being Auctioned Off: “Not long since…
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I’ll be completely honest, I did not finish this book entirely, as I didn’t agree with many of Wendell Berry’s conclusions. However, that being said, there’s plenty of stuff I do find very interesting that deserves highlighting. Several notes from reading just a bit of Wendell Berry’s Unsettling of America … Some quotes: “One of…
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The title essay stays with a great line: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” It’s long but it shows why she went nuts at one point in the 70s. The world was an absolute mess. I’m sure it’s going to get worse than that soon enough. This essay really made me think about…
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From JA Westenberg on Selfonomics, “Living Next Door to Moloch” “The content industry has stumbled into a coordination failure of brobdingnagian proportions. Everyone produces more content because everyone else produces more content, and the Nash equilibrium of this game is a world where infinite noise competes for zero attention. “We are, collectively, a grinding, screaming…
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Quotes from the book: Benjamin Hoff and His Conclusion on What We Can Learn from Pooh Corner: “Within each of us there is an owl, a rabbit, an Eeyore, and a Pooh. For too long, we have chosen the way of Owl and Rabbit. Now, like Eeyore, we complain about the results. But that accomplishes…
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E.B. White Mocking Gossip Writers on Their Lazy Use of Language: “On a fetid afternoon like this, when all the nobility goes out of a writer and parts of speech lie scattered around the room among cigarette butts and crushed paper cups, we envy the gossip columnists their lot.” (From his essay “No Verbs”) E.B.…
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On Bad Feelings as Messengers: “Stress, unhappiness, anxiety, and depression are not bad things. They are not human malfunctions. Quite the opposite, they are proof that everything is working as it should. They come to us as messengers, to tap us on the shoulder and point out that our lives have slipped out of alignment.” …
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I remember having much more extensive notes on this book, but I still have plenty of quotes. Paul Goodman on Abstractions: “The buoyant abstractions, spoken as if miracles were for the asking, ward off pain and uneasy conscience when one is no longer going to try to do anything practical.” Paul Goodman on Absurd Ideas:…
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Adam Savage on the Internet: “The internet is far from fulfilling its promise to be the compendium of all human knowledge, it’s more like the outline or the index. But where it shines is in giving people all over the planet the ability to find a peer group of enthusiasts with which to share their…
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Jan Lundeen & Jon Wagner on Why They Wrote Deep Space and Sacred Time: “…we were faced with the universal parental problem of how passively we should admit media fantasies into our family’s cultural life.” At family dinners, they’d find themselves disassembling favorite television shows “to see how they ‘work’ both as pleasure-giving entertainment and…
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I never got past more than a few chapters of this book, but the notes I took on the preface (written by Saul Bellow) and the first three or four chapters are extensive enough that it seems worth sharing them. … From the Foreword Written by Saul Bellow: On Academics : “Academics, even those describing…
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I love how Dana envisions the “common reader” — not the “incurious mass audience of the popular media” but rather “the idea of the general reader envisioned by Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf felt the vitality of literature depended — the intelligent, engaged non-specialist.” The first essay is the titular piece. It begins “American poetry…
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This isn’t Carl Sagan’s best book, but it was his last, and it has plenty of good stuff to say. … Chapter 5 is about “Four Cosmic Questions” 1st cosmic question: “Was there ever life on Mars?” 2nd cosmic question: “Is Titan a laboratory for the origins of life?” 3rd cosmic question: “Is there intelligent…