Quotes – 2017 Dec 6 – Why read the classics?

‘Why read the classics instead of reading works which will give us a deeper understanding of our own times?’

So what we can say is that the person who derives maximum benefit from a reading of the classics is the one who skilfully alternates classic readings with calibrated doses of contemporary material.

Perhaps the ideal would be to hear the present as a noise outside our window, warning us of the traffic jams and weather changes outside, while we continue to follow the discourse of the classics which resounds clearly and articulately inside our room.

 — Italo Calvino. “Why Read the Classics?.”

 

Quotes – 2017 Feb 16

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

— Henry Adams

Quotes – Life is difficulty

Life is difficulty.

This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths. It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult — once we truly understand and accept it — then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.

— The Road Less Traveled

Quotes – The love of books

My library is an archive of longings.

— Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

Quotes – Oct 19

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

— Henry David Thoreau

Words Are My Matter – Ursula K. Le Guin

In the new book of Ursula K. Le Guin — Words Are My Matter: Writings about Life and Books, 2000-2016 — she explains the intimacy of words to her as opposed to numbers or graphs.

There seems to be a firewall in my mind against ideas expressed in numbers and graphs rather than words, or in abstract words such as Sin or Creativity. I just don’t understand. And incomprehension is boredom.

With her powerful words, she also enlightens me about my own bias against dull academic writing — rightly or not.

And not only narrativity but the quality of the writing is of the first importance to me. Rightly or not, I believe a dull, inept style signals poverty or incompleteness of thought. I see the accuracy, scope, and quality of Darwin’s intellect directly expressed in the clarity, strength, and vitality of his writing — the beauty of it.

Quotes on Creativity

We need to feed ourselves discriminately — Garbage in, garbage out. Yet at the same time, it is rewarding to read liberally in order to cultivate your craftsmanship.

Just seeing excellent films doesn’t educate you at all, because they’re mysterious. A great film is mysterious. There’s no way of solving it. Why does Citizen Kane work? Well, it just does. It’s brilliant on every level, and there’s no way of putting your finger on any one thing that’s right. It’s just all right. But a bad film is immediately evident, and it can teach you more: “I’ll never do that, and I’ll never do that, and I’ll never do that.

— Ray Bradbury

A pianist is first and foremost a musician. So maybe every great creator is ultimately a philosopher.

You wanna be the next Tolkien? Don’t read big, Tolkien-esque fantasies. Tolkien didn’t read big, Tolkien-esque fantasies. He read books on Finnish philology. You go and read outside your comfort zone, go and learn stuff.

— Neil Gaiman

Quotes from “Letters to a Young Poet” #3

On aloneness:

Do not allow yourself to be confused in your aloneness by the something within you that wishes to be released from it. This very wish, if you will calmly and deliberately use it as a tool, will help to expand your solitude into far distant realms.

Embrace struggle:

But it is clear that we must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance. We can be sure of very little, but the need to court struggle is a surety that will not leave us.

On love:

The fact that something is difficult must be one more reason to do it.

To love is also good, for love is difficult. For one human being to love another is perhaps the must difficult task of all, the epitome, the ultimate test. It is that striving for which all other striving is merely preparation.

(The Seventh Letter)

On sadness:

… this is the reason the sadness passes: the something new within us, the thing that has joined us, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer there either — it is already in the blood. And we do not find out what it was. One would easily make us believe that nothing happened; and yet we have been changed …

Therefore it is so important to be alone and observant when one is sad. The seemingly uneventful moment, when our future really enters in, is very much closer to reality than that other loud and fortuitous point in time, when it happens as if coming from the outside.

The quieter and more patient, the more open we are when we are sad, the more resolutely does that something new enter into us, the deeper it is absorbed in us, the more certain we are to secure it, and the more certain it is to become our personal destiny.

On fate:

… what we call fate emerges from human beings; it does not enter into them from the outside. It is only because so many did not absorb their destinies while they lived in them, did not transform them into themselves, that they did not recognize what emerged from them.

On aloneness again:

To return to the subject of aloneness: It becomes increasingly clear that it is basically not something we can choose to have or not to have. We simply are alone. One can only delude one’s self and act as though it were not so — that is all.

(The Eighth Letter)

Quotes from “Letters to a Young Poet” #2

First, a quote that reminds me of Quotes – Sep 5.

Even the best writers can err in their expressions when they are asked to interpret the faintest of impulses and that which is beyond words.

A quote that resonates to the beautiful paragraph of “No experience was too insignificant – the smallest happening unfolds like destiny…” from The Third Letter.

If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.

The famous “live the question” paragraph:

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

Finally, on aloneness.

Wait patiently to see if your inner life feels restricted by the conditions of this career. I take it to be very difficult and very demanding, since it is burdened with many conventions, hardly allowing your personal interpretation of its designated duties. However, your pact with aloneness will be your support and solace even in the midst of unfamiliar situations. It is through that aloneness that you will find all your paths.

(The Fourth Letter)

Quotes from “Letters to a Young Poet” #1

Annie Dillard has said that day by day you have to give the work before you all the best stuff you have, not saving up for later projects. If you give freely, there will always be more.

This is a radical proposition that runs so contrary to human nature, or at least to my nature, that I personally keep trying to find loopholes in it. But it is only when I go ahead and decide to shoot my literary, creative wad on a daily basis that I get any sense of full presence, of being Zorba the Greek at the keyboard. Otherwise, I am a wired little rodent squirreling things away, hording and worrying about supply.

— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird