Defiance and acceptance come together well in the following principle: There is always a countermove, always an escape or a way through, so there is no reason to get worked up. No one said it would be easy and, of course, the stakes are high, but the path is there for those ready to take it. This is what we’ve got to do. And we know that it’s going to be tough, maybe even scary.
~ Ryan Holiday
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Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning.
~ Richard Chenevix Trench
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The truth is the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valor. It was theater.
~ David Foster Wallace
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Writing is essentially donkey work, manual labor of the mind. What makes it bearable are those moments (which sometimes can last for weeks, months) when the book takes over, takes on a life of its own, goes off in unexpected directions.
~ John Gregory Dunne
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A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimensions.
~ Oliver Wendell Berry
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I’m not saying that you have to be a reader to save your soul in the modern world. I’m saying it helps.
~ Walter Mosley
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These are serious fears. But they’re not the real fear. Not the Master Fear, the Mother of all Fears that’s so close to us that even when we verbalize it we don’t believe it. Fear That We Will Succeed. That we can access the powers we secretly know we possess. That we can become the person we sense in our hearts we truly are.
~ Steven Pressfield
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The premeditation of death is the premeditation of liberty; He who has learnt to die has forgot to serve.
~ Michel de Montaigne
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Somebody’s boring me—I think it’s me.
~ Dylan Thomas
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The creative mind gets poisoned with the idea that your great work will be the result of getting serious. So many of my good ideas come from what looks like goofing off, wasting time. Art is play. There’s no way to tell what’s deep or shallow until you play with the idea.
~ Austin Kleon
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