Nick Jaffe > Nick's Quotes

“Cormorant was my way of trying to know the world as it was before – a wilder place, where magic showed itself in weather and animal encounters”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant

“A culmination of various impulses – for time alone, for wilderness surfing, and for something I thought of as “full nature immersion” – the expedition before me also represented a living experiment. I had the notion that traveling in an ancient mode, removed from the ceaseless roar and electronic thrum of contemporary life, I could connect to the most basic aspect of my nature. Not so much my nature as an individual, but my nature as a member of our species shaped by longstanding, elemental human practices and by the elements themselves. I”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant

“I imagined being on watch onboard a frigate, wearing a woolen pea coat and drinking coffee from a tin mug. I thought that it was something Hemingway would do, or that I was like Jack Kerouac in the merchant marine in Lonesome Traveler.”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant

“Another admission: I am romantic, I dream-up radically impractical journeys just to try and feel or to intuit something from a past that may well have never existed – or not in the way I imagine it. Combined with this I have a tendency towards depressive states. My episodes have never been so bad that I couldn’t get out of bed and face the day, but after my time at the lighthouse and losing the woman whom I thought I loved so much, and drinking to bad effect every night, I felt a shift come on that scared me.”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant

“set a pot of water to boil on the camp stove and walked out to the farthest point under the cliffs. I dug a pit and thought of the latrine back at the San Carlos camp – flies in there, flies in the kitchen. I washed my hands, first in the sea, then rigorously with soap and fresh water back at my camp. This is what it takes, I thought, to get some solitude. You travel days and days down a desert coastline and sail off by yourself. I saw not a soul, nor evidence of anybody besides the weirdly placed panga on the cliff top. And for all this effort I felt not free exactly, but at least not put-upon. There was no conversation to make, just an enveloping silence with the crash and roll of small waves to break the feeling of looking at a giant photograph. I was finally outside of the day-to-day, and perhaps outside of myself for a moment as well.”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant

“I had a beautiful, intoxicating sail on the steady wind, making unbelievable time surfing down the gentle swells with surges to seven knots.”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant

“the small phalaropes with the clucking motion of their heads as they paddle; the sooty shearwaters in their hundreds like smoke-colored gulls coursing just inches above the surface; the terns, white like painted spirits, hovering then diving; and the black coots chopping away with stiff wing beats in asymmetrical formations.”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant

“His essential book, Sea-boats, Oars and Sails, written in the early 20th century, defines a sea-boat as “a means of transport as well as something to go sailing in; one that will bring her owner to whatever place he wishes on any day when boats of the same size are out fishing.”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant

“she does not sail at the pace of contemporary life, and 10 days or two weeks is what it takes merely to settle into the rhythm of boat life.”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant

“since I was re-imagining the past, I could easily sidestep the unpleasant parts – slavery and social immobility to name but two. This “better time” went with my ideas of the life I wanted, but I could not solve the puzzle of where to go, or how to live within this particular vision, except with the thought of an expedition.”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant

“embrace of the technocratic future leaves us bereft of the magic of the forest from whence we came. In his book, Nature Revealed, Edward O. Wilson writes, “Human nature today remains Paleolithic even in the midst of accelerating technological advance. Thus corporate CEOs impelled by stone-age emotions work international deals with cellular telephones at 30,000 feet.” Open wilderness formed us. We are wild in nature, made of the same stuff as the dolphins and whales, the island foxes, sea birds, and every other creature – bones and sinew, muscle and blood.”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant

“slope of a valley. There is something satisfyingly eerie about a landfall – any landfall. The growing coast ahead, no matter how exhaustively charted it is, or how old and familiar its history and internal topography, looks so imaginary from this sea distance. Watching it come slowly alive, inseparable from its broken reflection in the water, you feel that you’re making it up as you go along. It’s not real. On a green hill above the town you see a fine, brand-new medieval castle – turrets, towers, keeps, drawbridges, the lot. Like a novelist toying with an invented landscape on the page, you think, that won’t wash; and, obedient to the thought, the handsome castle rubs itself out and in its place there comes up a stolid clump of gasholders or the cooling towers of a power station.”
― Jonathan Raban, Coasting

“called me, checking-in to see that I wasn’t, on some level, trying to disappear at sea. I assured”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant

“how that can be, but there is nothing lonelier than being alone among other people. I would be better once underway again,”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant

“told myself. Alone in nature, alone on the sea – that never felt awkward.”
― Christian Beamish, The Voyage of the Cormorant

“open. Listen. Follow your curiosity. Ask questions. Sniff around. Remain open. Trust in the miraculous truth that new and marvelous ideas are looking for human collaborators every single day. Ideas of every kind are constantly galloping toward us, constantly passing through us, constantly trying to get our attention.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: How to Live a Creative Life, and Let Go of Your Fear

“stubbornness helps when it comes to the business of creative”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: How to Live a Creative Life, and Let Go of Your Fear

“Without it, you will never push yourself out of the suffocating insulation of personal safety and into the frontiers of the beautiful and the unexpected.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: How to Live a Creative Life, and Let Go of Your Fear

“Attempts at originality can often feel forced and precious, but authenticity has quiet resonance that never fails to stir me. Just say what you want to say, then, and say it with all your heart. Share whatever you are driven to share. If it’s authentic enough, believe me—it will feel original.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: How to Live a Creative Life, and Let Go of Your Fear

“debt will always be the abattoir of creative dreams.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

“Quit your complaining. It’s not the world’s fault that you wanted to be an artist. It’s not the world’s job to enjoy the films you make, and it’s certainly not the world’s obligation to pay for your dreams. Nobody wants to hear it. Steal a camera if you must, but stop whining and get back to work.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

“I started telling myself that I enjoyed my work. I proclaimed that I enjoyed every single aspect of my creative endeavors—the agony and the ecstasy, the success and the failure, the joy and the embarrassment, the dry spells and the grind and the stumble and the confusion and the stupidity of it all. I even dared to say this aloud. I told the universe (and anyone who would listen) that I was committed to living a creative life not in order to save the world, not as an act of protest, not to become famous, not to gain entrance to the canon, not to challenge the system, not to show the bastards, not to prove to my family that I was worthy, not as a form of deep therapeutic emotional catharsis . . . but simply because I liked it. So try saying this: “I enjoy my creativity.” And when you say it, be sure to actually mean it.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: How to Live a Creative Life, and Let Go of Your Fear

“For one thing, it will freak people out. I believe that enjoying your work with all your heart is the only truly subversive position left to take as a creative person these days. It’s such a gangster move, because hardly anybody ever dares to speak of creative enjoyment aloud, for fear of not being taken seriously as an artist. So say it. Be the weirdo who dares to enjoy.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: How to Live a Creative Life, and Let Go of Your Fear

“If people misunderstand what you’ve created, don’t sweat it. And what if people absolutely hate what you’ve created? What if people attack you with savage vitriol, and insult your intelligence, and malign your motives, and drag your good name through the mud? Just smile sweetly and suggest—as politely as you possibly can—that they go make their own fucking art. Then stubbornly continue making yours.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: How to Live a Creative Life, and Let Go of Your Fear

“The fact that I get to spend my life making objectively useless things means that I don’t live in a postapocalyptic dystopia. It means I am not exclusively chained to the grind of mere survival. It means we still have enough space left in our civilization for the luxuries of imagination and beauty and emotion—and even total frivolousness. Pure creativity is magnificent expressly because it is the opposite of everything else in life that’s essential or inescapable (food, shelter, medicine, rule of law, social order, community and familial responsibility, sickness, loss, death, taxes, etc.). Pure creativity is something better than a necessity; it’s a gift. It’s the frosting. Our creativity is a wild and unexpected bonus from the universe. It’s as if all our gods and angels gathered together and said, “It’s tough down there as a human being, we know. Here—have some delights.” It”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: How to Live a Creative Life, and Let Go of Your Fear

“I realized that, as a songwriter, the only thing I really do is make jewelry for the inside of other people’s minds.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

“My creative expression must be the most important thing in the world to me (if I am to live artistically), and it also must not matter at all (if I am to live sanely).”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

“And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.”
― Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer and Other Great Stories

“exactitude in some small matters is the very soul of discipline.”
― Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer

“It was, in the night, as though I had been faced by my own reflection in the depths of a somber and immense mirror.”
― Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer