Some Quotes for March 2024 (#23)
Ayesha A. Siddiqi, James Somers, Ron Heifetz, Stephen Grellet, Mary Gaitskill, Edward Gibbon, Alexander Chee, Marilynne Robinson, Paul Cézanne, C. S. Lewis
Link = source I've actually read/endorse. No link = random, out-of-context snippet I was able to track down on the internet. (Some of these are advice—others I just enjoy the language or sentiment.)
Every border implies the violence of its maintenance. –Ayesha A. Siddiqi
From “More People Should Write”: You should write because when you know that you’re going to write, it changes the way you live. I’m thinking about a book I read called Field Notes on Science & Nature, a collection of essays by scientists about their notes. It’s hard to imagine a more tedious concept—a book of essays about notes?—but in execution it was wonderful. What it teaches you, over and over again, is that the difference between you and a zoologist or you and a botanist is that the botanist, when she looks at a flower, has a question in mind. She’s trying to generate questions. For her the flower is the locus of many mental threads, some nascent, some spanning her career. Her field notebook is not some convenient way to store lifeless data to be presented in lifeless papers so that other scientists can replicate some dull experiment; it’s the site of a collision between a mind and a world. –James Somers
Leadership is disappointing people at a rate they can absorb. –Marty Linsky
From “The Friendship Challenge”: You can come in second or third or fourth or fifth place in a hundred different endeavors and still feel, if enough people love you, that you are a good and valuable person. If you’re, say, funny, generous, and loving, you might even be considered a superlative person without winning a single official competition. But how can you feel anything but bad, or at least anxious, if you are unofficially competing over how loving or generous you might be? –Mary Gaitskill
I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good thing, therefore, that I can do or any kindness I can show to any creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again. –Stephen Grellet
A man with one watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure. –unknown
The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous. –Edward Gibbon
Sometimes the writer writes one novel, then another, then another, and the first one he sells is the first one the public sees, but usually, the debut novel is not the first novel the writer wrote. There’s a private idea of the writer, known to the writer and whoever rejected him previously, and a public one, visible only in publication. Each book is something of a mask of the troubles that went into it, no matter how autobiographical it is, and so is the writer’s visible career. –Alexander Chee
From Gilead: I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. –Marilynne Robinson
There is no line;...there are only contrasts. –Paul Cézanne
If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep. –C. S. Lewis