“Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher’s the poet’s equal there.”
Emil Cioran, The Temptation to Exist
Category: Quotes
“Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye— is the great invention of the world.”
Abraham Lincoln
“But really as I run, I don’t think much of anything worth mentioning. I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void… As I run I tell myself to think of a river. And clouds. But essentially I’m not thinking of a thing. All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says.”
Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.
Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
“Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.”
Alain de Botton
Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.
Pablo Picasso