Category: Asides

Harington’s Destiny

December 22, 2010 at 10:46 am

“If you are destined to become a writer, you can’t help it. If you can help it, you aren’t destined to become a writer. The frustrations and disappointments, not even to mention the unspeakable loneliness, are too unbearable for anyone who doesn’t have a deep sense of being unable to […]

Rukeyser on the Universe

November 18, 2010 at 12:36 pm

‎”The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” — Muriel Rukeyser

Sim on Ideas

September 27, 2010 at 8:47 pm

“These are ideas. I could say that they just came to me, but it would be more accurate to say that I went to them. Ideas – and new connections between ideas – lead you away from commonly held perceptions of reality. Ideas lead you out here. Ideas lead you […]

Stoppard on Writers and Words

September 24, 2010 at 9:32 am

I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.” — Tom Stoppard (from The Real Thing)

March 10, 2010 at 9:51 am

I tend to think that what fame has done is to replace the sea as the element of choice of adventure for young people. If you were a dashing young man in the 19th century you would probably have wanted to run away to sea, just as in the 20th […]

August 3, 2009 at 11:16 am

“In solitude I used to wander about the garden, alternately collecting birds’ eggs and meditating on the flight of time. If I may judge by my own recollections, the important and formative impressions of childhood rise to consciousness only in fugitive moments in the midst of childish occupations, and are […]

July 21, 2009 at 11:54 am

“To have the management of the mind is a great art, and it may be attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise…Let him take a course of chymistry, or a course of rope-dance, or a course of any thing to which he is inclined at the time. […]

July 8, 2009 at 10:59 am

“Once you have established a belief, the phenomenon adjusts its manifestations to support that belief and thereby escalate it.” — John Keel

June 8, 2009 at 3:51 pm

“When the Lord finished the world, he pronounced it good. That is what I said about my first work, too. But Time, I tell you, Time takes the confidence out of these incautious opinions. It is more than likely that He thinks about the world, now, pretty much as I […]

June 3, 2009 at 10:23 am

“Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private.” — Alan Ginsberg