Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

Oysters open completely when the moon is full; and when the crab sees one, it throws a piece of stone or seaweed into it and the oyster cannot close again so that it serves the crab for meat. Such is the fate of him who opens his mouth too much and thereby puts himself at the mercy of the listener.

#twitter

Cells#5 | Atsuko Hatano [for the first time posting music]

https://atsukohatano.bandcamp.com/album/cells-5

Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Voiceless”

Alas for those who never sing
But die with all their music in them.

Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves

Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share. 

Auden

We would rather be ruined than changed.
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.

Mary Wollstonecraft responding to Edmund Burke

... the ivy is beautiful, but, when it insidiously destroys the trunk from which it receives support, who would not grub it up?

Cohen v. California (1971)

One man's vulgarity is another man's lyric. 

Rilke (trans Stephen Mitchell) The Duino Elegies

... for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Dear Abby

The best index to a person's character is (a) how he treats people who can't do him any good, and (b) how he treats people who can't fight back.

Seneca

Now I have no monsters left, and 'tis less labour for Hercules to fulfil my orders than for me to order; with joy he welcomes my commands.

James Baldwin

I may also have been afraid, and I could not have been the only one, that if I began to weep I would not be able to stop.

Anxiety emails between Paul Ford and Virginia Heffernan

https://medium.com/message/just-checking-in-d2b5540f0064

Alice Walker

Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. 

But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening.

Robert Frost

Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.

V.S. Pritchett

Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing.

Anne Lammott, “A Velocity of Being”

If you love to read, or learn to love reading, you will have an amazing life. Period. Life will always have hardships, pressure, and incredibly annoying people, but books will make it all worthwhile.

Mike Kelley

The hidden burden of the gift is that it calls for payback, but the price is unspecified, repressed. 

Adventure Time, featuring Olivia Olson

Everything stays/right where you left it
Everything stays/but it still changes
Ever so slightly/daily and nightly
In little ways/everything stays

Karl Popper

If we wish to remain human…. we must go on into the unknown, the uncertain and insecure.

Sofia Rosenfeld paraphrasing Hannah Arendt

What individuals require is the return to a kind of public life that forces them to constantly weigh and consider things from the perspective of other people.

Billy Wilder

If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you.

Dolly Parton

Find out who you are and do it on purpose.

Martha Graham (to Agnes de Mille)

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening htat is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open.

Bob Woodward

All good work is done in defiance of management.

Vince Gillian

If everyone's telling you you're drunk, maybe you need to sit down.

Ad-Rock

I'd rather be a hypocrite than the same person forever.

Andrew Solomon, "Far From the Tree"

Perhaps the immutable error of parenthood is that we give our children what we wanted, whether they want it or not.

Alex Tabarrok, quoted in the New York Times

People say things like, 'You shouldn't cut corners.' But that's stupid. Of course you should cut corners when you need to get somewhere fast. Ambulances go through red lights!

Vincent Van Gogh, Letter to Theo

My dear Theo,
Thanks for your letter, thanks for the enclosure. Now listen here.
[…]
I tell you, if one wants to be active, one mustn't be afraid to do something wrong sometimes, not afraid to lapse into some mistakes. To be good — many people think that they'll achieve it by doing no harm — and that's a lie, and you said yourself in the past that it was a lie. That leads to stagnation, to mediocrity. Just slap something on it when you see a blank canvas staring at you with a sort of imbecility.
You don't know how paralyzing it is, that stare from a blank canvas that says to the painter you can't do anything. The canvas has an idiotic stare, and mesmerizes some painters so that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the truly passionate painter who dares — and who has once broken the spell of 'you can't'.
Life itself likewise always turns towards one an infinitely meaningless, discouraging, dispiriting blank side on which there is nothing, any more than on a blank canvas.
But however meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, and who knows something, doesn't let himself be fobbed off like that. He steps in and does something, and hangs on to that, in short, breaks, 'violates' — they say.
Let them talk, those cold theologians.
Yours truly, 
Vincent

Ori Elon, creator of Shtisel

The longing for the dead and, no less, the longing for the living. The unbridgeable distance that always exists between any two people, between family members, between loved ones. The distance between man and God, and also the unbridgeable distance within man himself — between the mind and the heart. In the third season, the feeling of loss and longing is even more acute

Raymond Chandler

I am a writer, and there comes a time when that which I write has to belong to me, has to be written alone and in silence, with no one looking over my shoulder, no one telling me a better way to write it. It doesn't have to be great writing, it doesn't even have to be terribly good. It just has to be mine.

Notes by Octavia Butler

Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. 

Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours

You love most of all those who need you 
as they need a crowbar or a hoe. 
You have not grown old, and it is not too late 
To dive into your increasing depths 
where life calmly gives out its own secret.

Kate Baer, “Motherload”

...

She keeps an office in her sternum, the flat
bone in the center of her chest with all its
urgent papers, vast appointments, lists of
minor things. In her vertebrae she holds more
carnal tasks: milk jugs, rotten plants, heavy-
bottomed toddlers in all their mortal rage.

T. E. Lawrence

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

 

 

James Baldwin, “Me and My House”

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

Leo Tolstoy

Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.

Annie Dillard

How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.

Sean & Abigail Bengson "The Keep Going On Song"

I pray my rage is fire & it cleans my mind out
so I can listen…
we don't know we don't know we are making this up as we go

Stanley Plumly, "At Night"

When did I know that I'd have to cary it around
in order to have it when I need it, say in a pocket

the dark itself not dark enough but needing to be
added to, handful by handful if necessary, until

the way my mother would sit all night in a room
without the lights, smoking, until she disappeared?

...

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Phillip Larkin, "Days"

What are days for?

Days are where we live.   

They come, they wake us   

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:   

Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor   

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

Malcolm Gladwell

The older I get, the more I understand that the only way to say valuable things is to lose your fear of being correct.

De Medicina – Aulus Cornelius Celsus c25 B.C – 50 A.D.

Live in rooms full of light.  Avoid heavy food.  Be moderate in drinking of wine.  Take massage, baths, exercise and gymnastics.  Fight insomnia with gentle rocking or the sound of running water.  Change surroundings and take long journeys.  Strictly avoid frightening ideas.  Indulge in cheerful conversation and amusements.  Listen to music

Rebecca Traister, "The Only Strategy Left for Democrats"

It is not nefarious to make people's lives better in the hope that they will keep you in power so that you can continue to make their lives better: that's actually a healthy view of how a government and its people might ideally operate.

Father Daniel Berrigan on Dorothy Day

She lived as though the truth were true.

Gertude Stein

Everybody gets so much information all day that they lose their common sense.

Hieu Minh Nguyen, "The New Decade"

…

If you were here we'd dance, I think.

If you were here, you'd know what to do

what to do with all this time

Horace, Odes I, ii, "How to Live" (65-8 BC)

Don't waste your time, Leucónoe, living in fear and hope
of the imprevisible future; forget the horoscope.
Accept whatever happens. Whether the gods allow
us fifty winters more or drop us at this one now
which flings the high Tyrrhenian waves on the stone piers,
decant your wine; the days are more fun than the years
which pass us by while we discuss them. Act with zest
one day at a time, and never mind the rest.