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The heart of the artist is a little bit hollow. The bones of the artist are a little bit hollow. The brain of the artist is a little bit hollow. But this allows them to fly.
She was alone so she could hear herself thinking. She was alone so she could hear herself living.
“An artist knows himself to be an artist because of how he relates to his own sincerity,”
Here in the first draft of existence, we crafted our own second drafts—stories and books and movies and plays—polishing our stones to show God and each other what we wanted the next draft to be, comforting ourselves with our visions. On good days, we acknowledged that God had done pretty well: he had given us life, and had filled in most of the blanks of existence, except for the blank in the heart.
For art is not made for living bodies—it is made for the cold, eternal soul.
What of the strength of our connections with certain people, and the weakness of our connections with certain other ones?
This igniting always happens in the very first instant and it never goes away. No stupidities can destroy the igniting, so even if those two people never meet again, a connection always remains. Mira felt this way about Annie. It wasn’t that Mira had met her in some previous life. It was that she was meeting her in this one—and isn’t that rare! Why is it so hard to meet in this life?
While Annie had no one, she was completely alone. That was why they were drawn to her. Mira and her friends admired her deeply. She was who they were pretending to be.
But in the next draft of existence, they will not understand this; how one person’s beautiful face could pull another person deep into their greatest sorrow.
For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.
Perhaps we can only give in total beauty and simplicity in the moment of our dying, because that is the only giving that demands no return.
The last thing that’s needed is to judge your own heart, but then that’s the first thing you go and do. A heart rushes to judge itself. A heart should have better things to do. A heart doesn’t.
it felt like her one true experience of life, since it was not something she had invented or pursued.
There are so many things you can do with your body if you can let it relax and bend to the shape of the universe,
There is something exciting about a first draft—anarchic, scrappy, full of life, flawed. A first draft has something that a second one has not.
Immortality means googling yourself forever.
Who knew that the world would become so hot, when once it was cool, and life just beginning?
Were we the lucky ones, to have been chosen to live in this terrible time—to have been chosen to live in this heartbreaking time—as any moment in human civilization will break your heart, but none more so than the end?
They will remember this first draft the way we remember our first loves. The second draft will be like a mature love: long-lasting, decent, steady and right. It will not be like a first love: short-lived, painful, directionless and all wrong. They will look back on the world in which we are living with a certain bewilderment and awe, not quite believing that life was ever this way, just as when we are in a mature relationship, we can’t ever believe we lived through that first one. Some part of us will always love the first one, and long for it a little bit. So will people in the next draft of
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God doesn’t care what you think about a band.
Stripped of the glamour and beauty of youth, everything we ever did—it all looks different now. We can see our choices as acts in themselves, not stages on life’s way, for if progress in human history is an illusion, so is progress in a human life.
The person who the gods are watching through you often develops a certain attachment to you. That person may find themselves thinking about you a lot, and you may find yourself thinking about them a lot, too. It often happens between two such people that they will feel fated to be in each other’s lives. They might like or dislike the other one, or have no clear feelings between them at all, yet there they are, for minutes or hours or weeks or years, mysteriously in each other’s orbit, as though something of significance is going on.
A daughter might feel guilty for having her own laws, but life will force her to live them.
Mira knew that humans made art because we were made in God’s image—which doesn’t mean we look like God; it means we like doing the same thing God likes. Both making life and making art are pouring spirit into form.
