heresay

[heresay]

There is a time for any fledgling artist where one's taste exceeds one's abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.

Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

[heresay]

You can either set brick as a laborer or as an artist. You can make the work a chore, or you can have a good time. You can do it the way you used to clear the dinner dishes when you were thirteen, or you can do it as a Japanese person would perform a tea ceremony, with a level of concentration and care in which you can lose yourself, and so in which you can find yourself.

Anne Lamott

[heresay]

The idea of a literary canon, the important books one should apparently read, is hotly debated of course, which often feels necessary and or fun. Voices gain cultural prominence, or lose it, or are blocked from participating, invited or disinvited, prized or banned, and I like listening, occasionally participating in this conversation in one way or another. But the most important literary canon is one's own, not just a list of favourite books or what have you, but the individual moments, the twists of plot or turns of phrase, the tiny secret reasons you love what you love. This canon keeps you company, gives you comfort and delight. You can take some bits with you when you go sit some place, and sometimes you could do something with them, aside from just marveling at them for the umpteenth time.

Daniel Handler, And Then? And Then? What Else?

[heresay]

The call to the creative life is a call to dignity, to a life of vulnerability and adventure and the call to a life that exquisite excitement and indeed ecstasy will often visit.

John O'Donohue

[heresay]

It is a strange and wonderful fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. Rilke said, ‘Being here is so much,’ and it is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free.

John O'Donohue

[heresay]

Expectations are resentments waiting to happen.

Anne Lamott

[heresay]

My gratitude for good writing is unbounded; I’m grateful for it the way I’m grateful for the ocean.

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

[heresay]

You don't always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it too.

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

[heresay]

It's funny: I always imagined when I was a kid that adults had some kind of inner toolbox full of shiny tools: the saw of discernment, the hammer of wisdom, the sandpaper of patience. But then when I grew up I found that life handed you these rusty bent old tools - friendships, prayer, conscience, honesty - and said 'do the best you can with these, they will have to do'. And mostly, against all odds, they do.

Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith

[heresay]

There is a strange attitude and feeling that one is not yet in real life. For the time being one is doing this or that, but whether it is a woman or a job, it is not yet what is really wanted, and there is always the fantasy that sometime in the future the real thing will come about. If this attitude is prolonged, it means a constant inner refusal to commit oneself to the moment. With this there is often, to a smaller or greater extent, a savior complex, with the secret thought that one day one will be able to save the world; the last word in philosophy, or religion, or politics, or art, or something else, will be found.

Marie-Louise von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus

[heresay]

My God, these Feeling types! … Sensitive people are just tyrannical people - everybody else has to adapt to them.

[heresay]

Depressions and melancholy are often a cover for tremendous greed. At the beginning of an analysis there is often a depressed state of resignation - life has no meaning, there is no feeling of being in life. An exaggerated state can develop into complete lameness. Quite young people give the impression of having the resignation of a bitter old man or woman. When you dig into such a black mood you find that behind it there is overwhelming greed - for being loved, for being very rich, for having the right partner, for being the top dog,...

Marie-Louise von Franz, The Psychological Meaning of Redemption Motifs in Fairytales

[heresay]

If we can stay with the tension of opposites long enough —sustain it, be true to it—we can sometimes become vessels within which the divine opposites come together and give birth to a new reality.

Marie-Louise von Franz

[heresay]

The way memory is the ringing after a gunshot. The way we try to remember the gunshot but can’t. The way memory gets up after someone has died and starts walking.

Victoria Chang, Obit

[heresay]

We all have at least two sides. The world we live in is a world of opposites. And the trick is to reconcile those opposing things. I've always liked both sides. In order to appreciate one, you have to know the other. The more darkness you can gather up, the more light you can see too.

David Lynch

[heresay]

Inside, we are ageless… and when we talk to ourselves, it's the same age of the person we were talking to when we were little. It's the body that is changing around that ageless center.

David Lynch

[heresay]

It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It's better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it's a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else.

David Lynch