Gray > Gray's Quotes

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“I didn't find my story; it found me, as autobiography always does: finds you out in your deepest most private places.”
― Kelly Cherry, The Exiled Heart: A Meditative Autobiography

“Humans, short-lived and locked out of the gray places for life, do not do well with uncertainty. If they cannot have what might, what could, what should, and perhaps most awful of all what should have been, then they will dream it up instead, imagine it into being in whatever twisted or beautiful form suits, and then drive their fellows to their knees in chains by the thousand and million to pretend in chorus that it is so.”
― Richard K. Morgan, The Steel Remains

“Please, don't torture me with cliches. If you're going to try to intimidate me, have the courtesy to go away for a while, acquire a better education, improve your vocabulary, and come back with some fresh metaphors.”
― Dean Koontz

“Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.”
― Oscar Wilde

“To think clearly about the future, we need to clean up the language that we use in labeling the beliefs we had in the past.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day’s end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn’t live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul’s. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Sæculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part?”
― Neal Stephenson, Anathem

“There is no time for cut-and-dried monotony. There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time.”
― Coco Chanel

“It is always hard to believe that the courageous step is so close to us, that it is closer than we ever could imagine, that in fact, we already know what it is, and that the step is simpler, more radical than we had thought: which is why we so often prefer the story to be more elaborate, our identities clouded by fear, the horizon safely in the distance, the essay longer than it needs to be and the answer safely in the realm of impossibility.”
― David Whyte, Consolations - Revised edition: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

“It is precisely because we resist the darkness in ourselves that we miss the depths of the loveliness, beauty, brilliance, creativity, and joy that lie at our core.”
― Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals

“They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.”
― Tara Gentile, Quiet Power Strategy

“the phenomenology of enjoyment has eight major components. When people reflect on how it feels when their experience is most positive, they mention at least one, and often all, of the following. First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing. Second, we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. Third and fourth, the concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and provides immediate feedback. Fifth, one acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life. Sixth, enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions. Seventh, concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over. Finally, the sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours. The combination of all these elements causes a sense of deep enjoyment that is so rewarding people feel that expending a great deal of energy is worthwhile simply to be able to feel it.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

“Sometimes I think the urge to believe in our own worldview is our most powerful intellectual imperative, the mind’s equivalent of feeding, fighting, and fornicating. People will eagerly twist facts into wholly unrecognizable shapes to fit them into existing suppositions. They’ll ignore the obvious, select the irrelevant, and spin it all into a tapestry of self-deception, solely to justify an idea, no matter how impoverished or self-destructive. And”
― Barry Eisler, Extremis

“True artists don’t think. They react. I never think. My entire existences is a spontaneous reaction to the relentless stimulation of the universe, you know? I don’t need drugs because I’m on a perma-glow from the inexorable potential of my own artistic expression.”
― S.C. Jensen, Tropical Punch

“is it fair to myself or others to assume these negative identities when what I'm really identifying is simply how I'm different? Of course not. And is it really an act of personal growth or self-improvement to set a goal to change these traits in favor of ones that conform to cultural expectations? Of course not—it's an act of personal violence and self-negation.”
― Tara McMullin, What Works: A Comprehensive Framework to Change the Way We Approach Goal Setting

“The timely pursuit of your intentions”
― Jane B. Burka, Procrastination: Why You Do It, What to Do About It Now

“Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains.”
― Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem

“You pull the thing into your shoulder, look down the thing, then flip the other thing, and finally squeeze the clicky thingy and boom. Got all that?”
― J.N. Chaney, The First Peacemaker

“Everything happened. Not for a reason”
― Alex Marshall, A Crown for Cold Silver