"I am offering this poem to you, since I have nothing else to give." ~Jimmy Santiago Baca
“A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You’ve got to kick off with a killer, to grab the attention. Then you’ve got to take it up a notch, or cool it off a notch…oh, there are a lot of rules.”
~Nick Hornby
I don’t know what it means to be “happy”… Pleasure is not happiness. Because I kill pleasure – you know what I mean? I take too much of it, and therefore I make it non-pleasurable – like too much coffee, and you’re miserable. And I do that to pleasure often … there’s no pleasure that I haven’t actually made myself sick of.
The late Philip Seymour Hoffman (July 23, 1967 – February 2, 2014) on happiness, in conversation with philosopher Simon Critchley at the Rubin Museum in 2012.
Via Explore (a Brain Pickings Tumblr project), thanks Maria.
“The world to me was a secret, which I desired to discover; to her it was a vacancy, which she sought to people with imaginations of her own.”
~Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
“Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.”
– Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad
“Stop worrying about your identity and concern yourself with the people you care about, ideas that matter to you, beliefs you can stand by, tickets you can run on. Intelligent humans make those choices with their brain and hearts and they make them alone. The world does not deliver meaning to you. You have to make it meaningful…and decide what you want and need and must do. It’s a tough, unimaginably lonely and complicated way to be in the world. But that’s the deal: you have to live; you can’t live by slogans, dead ideas, clichés, or national flags. Finding an identity is easy. It’s the easy way out.”
– Zadie Smith, On Beauty
Words ... for the Time Being 