W.E.B. Du Bois letter to his daughter

The main thing is the YOU beneath the clothes and skin—the ability to do, the will to conquer, the determination to understand and know this great, wonderful, curious world. 

Don't shrink from new experiences and custom. Take the cold bath bravely. Enter into the spirit of your big bedroom. Enjoy what is and not pine for what is not. 

Read some good, heavy, serious books just for discipline: Take yourself in hand and master yourself. Make yourself do unpleasant things, so as to gain the upper hand of your soul.

Brandon Taylor, “Massachusetts holy ghost”

Ask not for whom the hand claps back for it claps back at you. 

Dorothy Parker | Telegram to Robert Benchley, 31 Dec 1929

YOU COME RIGHT OVER HERE AND EXPLAIN WHY THEY ARE HAVING ANOTHER YEAR

Gwendolyn Brooks, We Real Cool

THE POOL PLAYERS. 
SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

Sharon Olds

I was a late bloomer.
But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.

Rosemary Hill reviewing Mark Dery’s biography of Edward Gorey

Some fans who wrote to him got a postcard saying 'You've written to me to no avail/Because I never read my mail'; others didn't. When he read that Carol Burnett answered all her fan letters he was aghast. 'This isn't possible! Are you insane? Have you no priorities?!'

Adrienne Rich, “Transcendental Etudes”

No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history
or music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
–And in fact we can't live like that: we take on
everything at once before we've even begun
to read or mark time, we're forced to begin
in the midst of the hard movement,
the one already sounding as we are born.

Jorge Luis Borges, Twenty Conversations with Borges, Including a Selection of Poems

A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. 

Thomas Mann, "Essays of Three Decades"

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Kurt Vonnegut, "Mother Night"

Be careful who you pretend to be, because you are who you pretend to be.

Michaela Coel on "Chewing Gum" in Time

I don't think we should be presentable or present ourselves for the sake of others.

Toni Morrison, "Song of Solomon"

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

Joy Harjo, "This Morning I Pray for My Enemies" (1951)

…
The door to the mind should only open from the heart.
An enemy who gets in, risks the dangers of becoming a friend.

Aristotle

We envy those who are near us in time, place, age, or reputation…those whose possession of or success in a thing is a reproach to us: these are our neighbors and equals; for it is clear that it is our own fault we have missed the good thing in question.

Seneca

It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor. 

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.