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[slowdays-fastcompany]

What I can follow more than anything is that I know what truth sounds like and I can recognize it. It comes from the most authentic and whole-hearted expression of experience, of self, of expertise, and that wholeheartedness and brave truth-telling is my true north. The one thing that I would say about all the people that I have the great honour of representing is that everybody I represent is who they say they are. I only represent people who are the same in every room, who bring them whole selves to every situation. I mean whether you are talking about Oprah, or Brene Brown or Sheryl Sandberg, any of the people, if you were in their kitchen, you would see the same person accepting the Nobel prize. That essential truth is important to me. As soon as I sense a falseness, I am gone. Everybody hates phonies but I really hate phonies. I can't do it, I don't know how people do it. When you tell the truth people are connected to you and are drawn to you, they would say me too.

[slowdays-fastcompany]

[slowdays-fastcompany]

All decisions we make in life are based on fear

Is this true? not convinced

[slowdays-fastcompany]

I sat at the desk and I concentrated. I didn’t glaze over looking at the words, or stumble about in my chair reeling with fog and fatigue. Rather, I sat down each morning with a clear mind and hour after hour I worked. The rectangle had opened wide and remained open: in the middle stood an idea. A great excitement formed itself around this idea, and took hold of me. I began fantasizing over the idea, rushing ahead of it, envisioning its full and particular strength and power long before it had clarified. Out of this fantasizing came images, and out of the images a wholeness of thought and language that amazed me each time it repeated itself. At the end of the week I had a large amount of manuscript on my desk. On Friday afternoon I put away the work. On Monday morning I looked at it, and I saw that the pages contained merit but the idea was ill-conceived. It didn’t work at all. I’d have to abandon all that I had done. I felt deflated. The period of inspired labor was at an end. The murk and the vapor closed in on me again, the rectangle shriveled and I was back to eking out painfully small moments of clarity, as usual and as always. Still, it was absorbing to remember the hours I had put in while under the spell of my vision. I felt strengthened by the sustained effort of work the fantasizing had led to.

vivian gornick on the ebb and flow of creativity and self doubt- and the osmotic relationship of these two states

[slowdays-fastcompany]

Some writers can handle lava with bare hands, but I’m not so tough, my skin is not asbestos. And in fact I have no interest in confession. My games are transformation and invention.

Ursula K. Le Guin on Writing as Falling in Love

[slowdays-fastcompany]

We are less bored than our ancestors were, but we are more afraid of boredom. We have come to know, or rather to believe, that boredom is not part of the natural lot of man, but can be avoided by a sufficiently vigorous pursuit of excitement.

bertrand russell,  (via thecharliedangerhart)

[slowdays-fastcompany]

learning to live wide rather than long

seneca https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/01/seneca-on-the-shortness-of-life/

[slowdays-fastcompany]

Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina on their wedding day. (Photo by Agnès Varda). March, 1961

[slowdays-fastcompany]

He would write me beautiful letters but then I wouldn’t see him for three weeks because he would go out to buy cigarettes and never come back. It was very strange.

Anna Karina, from an interview conducted c. May 2016

[slowdays-fastcompany]

[slowdays-fastcompany]

Movies do not change, but their viewers do. When I saw "La Dolce Vita" in 1960, I was an adolescent for whom "the sweet life" represented everything I dreamed of: sin, exotic European glamour, the weary romance of the cynical newspaperman. When I saw it again, around 1970, I was living in a version of Marcello's world; Chicago's North Avenue was not the Via Veneto, but at 3 a.m. the denizens were just as colorful, and I was about Marcello's age. When I saw the movie around 1980, Marcello was the same age, but I was 10 years older, had stopped drinking, and saw him not as a role model but as a victim, condemned to an endless search for happiness that could never be found, not that way. By 1991, when I analyzed the film a frame at a time at the University of Colorado, Marcello seemed younger still, and while I had once admired and then criticized him, now I pitied and loved him. And when I saw the movie right after Mastroianni died, I thought that Fellini and Marcello had taken a moment of discovery and made it immortal.[37]

ebert

[slowdays-fastcompany]

[slowdays-fastcompany]

[slowdays-fastcompany]

Who will get me to a party Who do I have yet to meet You, you look a bit like coffee And you taste a little like me How can I keep from moving Now I need a change of scenery Just listen to me I won't pretend to understand the movement of the wind Or the waves in the ocean Or how like the hours I change softly slowly Plainly blindly oh me oh my

[slowdays-fastcompany]

[slowdays-fastcompany]

[slowdays-fastcompany]

via weheartit