Everyone should leave the table feeling as if they’ve gotten a bad deal,” my father once taught me joylessly. “This way, you may rest assured that nobody was taken for a ride, and that nobody can get too far ahead.
You may want your work to be perfect, in other words; I just want mine to be finished.
I don’t know exactly what I am, but I am curious enough to go find out!
Your ego is a wonderful servant, but it’s a terrible master – because the only thing your ego ever wants is reward, reward, and more reward. And since there’s never enough reward to satisfy, your ego will always be disappointed. Left unmanaged, that kind of disappointment will rot you from the inside out. An unchecked ego is what the Buddhists call “a hungry ghost” – forever famished, eternally howling with need and greed.
A man can’t help where he’s born. A cat can have kittens in the oven, but that don’t make ’em biscuits.
Most dangerously of all, such thinking assumes that if you cannot win, then you must not continue to play.
But to become an adult, one must step into the field of honor. Everything will be expected of you now. You will need to be vigilant in your principles. Sacrifices will be demanded. You will be judged. If you make mistakes, you must account for them. There will be instances when you must cast aside your impulses and take a higher stance than another person – a person without honor – might take. Such instances may hurt, but that’s why honor is a painful field.
Keep in mind that for most of history people just made things, and they didn’t make such a big freaking deal out of it.
You may spend your whole life following your curiosity and have absolutely nothing to show for it at the end except one thing. You will have the satisfaction of knowing that you passed your entire existence in devotion to the noble human virtue of inquisitiveness.
All the good ideas seem daunting at first.
I’ll tell you something, Vivian. I have no regrets. When I was a young girl, I honestly believed that a life spent in the theater would be nothing but fun. And God help me, kiddo – it was.
What was there for Harper Lee to be afraid of, after all? Possibly just this: That she could not outdo Harper Lee.
For better or for worse, my dad taught me that the best place to pitch a tent will always be the spot marked NO CAMPING.
Boris Pasternak described this phenomenon beautifully, when he wrote, “No genuine book has a first page.
Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in comon with Love.
It is in our sleep that we most glimpse the power of spirit. Our minds will speak across this narrow distance. It will be here, together in nocturnal stillness, that we shall finally become unbound by time, by space, by natural law and physical law. We shall roam the world however we like, in our dreams. We shall speak with the dead, transform into animals and objects, fly across time. Our intellects shall be nowhere to be found, and our minds will be unfettered.
All lovers, even the most faithful lovers, are vulnerable to abandonment against their will. I know this simple fact to be true, for I myself have abandoned people who did not want me to go, and I myself have been abandoned by those whom I begged to stay.
While it’s lovely to be childlike in your pursuit of creativity, in other words, it’s dangerous to be childish.
We must risk delight,” he wrote. “We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.
Nature provides the seed; man provides the garden; each is grateful for the other’s help.