S. > S.'s Quotes

“The highest reward for a man's toil is not what he gets for it but what he becomes by it.”
― John Ruskin

“When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.”
― John Ruskin

“No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, or happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world than man could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.”
― John Ruskin, Modern Painters: Volume 3. Of Many Things

“Education...is a painful, continual and difficult work to be done in kindness, by watching, by warning,... by praise, but above all -- by example.”
― John Ruskin

“Modern traveling is not traveling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.”
― John Ruskin

“The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.”
― John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice

“My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there.”
― Charles F. Kettering Foundation

“I base most of my fashion taste on what doesn't itch.”
― Gilda Radner

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity.”
― Gilda Radner

“You learn not to mourn every little thing out here, or you’d never, ever stop grieving.”
― Alexandra Fuller, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

“If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.”
― David Sedaris, Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays

“It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles

“See, you think I give a shit. Wrong. In fact, while you talk, I'm thinking; How can I give less of shit? That's why I look interested.”
― Justin Halpern

“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.”
― Geoff Dyer

“Life is bearable even when it's unbearable: that is what's so terrible, that is the unbearable thing about it.”
― Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence

“Sometimes I think my ability to concentrate is being nibbled away by the internet; other times I think it's being gulped down in huge, Jaws-shaped chunks. In those quaint days before the internet, once you made it to your desk there wasn't much to distract you. You could sit there working or you could just sit there. Now you sit down and there's a universe of possibilities – many of them obscurely relevant to the work you should be getting on with – to tempt you. To think that I can be sitting here, trying to write something about Ingmar Bergman and, a moment later, on the merest whim, can be watching a clip from a Swedish documentary about Don Cherry – that is a miracle (albeit one with a very potent side-effect, namely that it's unlikely I'll ever have the patience to sit through an entire Bergman film again).

Then there's the outsourcing of memory. From the age of 16, I got into the habit of memorising passages of poetry and compiling detailed indexes in the backs of books of prose. So if there was a passage I couldn't remember, I would spend hours going through my books, seeking it out. Now, in what TS Eliot, with great prescience, called "this twittering world", I just google the key phrase of the half-remembered quote. Which is great, but it's drained some of the purpose from my life.

Exactly the same thing has happened now that it's possible to get hold of out-of-print books instantly on the web. That's great too. But one of the side incentives to travel was the hope that, in a bookstore in Oregon, I might finally track down a book I'd been wanting for years. All of this searching and tracking down was immensely time-consuming – but only in the way that being alive is time-consuming.”
― Geoff Dyer

“Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I ­always have to feel that I'm bunking off from something.”
― Geoff Dyer

“There are so few people given us to love. I want to tell my daughters this, that each time you fall in love it is important, even at nineteen. Especially at nineteen. And if you can, at nineteen, count the people you love on one hand, you will not, at forty, have run out of fingers on the other. There are so few people given us to love and they all stick.”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them instead”
― Anne Enright, The Gathering

“Nothing had happened yet in my life except the need to get out of it.”
― Anne Enright

“Imagine that you are dying. If you had a terminal disease would you ­finish this book? Why not? The thing that annoys this 10-weeks-to-live self is the thing that is wrong with the book. So change it. Stop arguing with yourself. Change it. See? Easy. And no one had to die.”
― Anne Enright

“Trust your reader. Not everything needs to be explained. If you really know something, and breathe life into it, they'll know it too.”
― Esther Freud

“The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Charm is often despised but I can never see why. No one has it who isn't capable of genuinely liking others, at least at the actual moment of meeting and speaking. Charm is always genuine; it may be superficial but it isn't false.”
― P.D. James, The Children of Men

“Open your mind to new experiences, particularly to the study of other ­people. Nothing that happens to a writer – however happy, however tragic – is ever wasted.”
― P.D. James

“I'm a writer by profession and it's totally clear to me that since I started blogging, the amount I write has increased exponentially, my daily interactions with the views of others have never been so frequent, the diversity of voices I engage with is far higher than in the pre-Internet age—and all this has helped me become more modest as a thinker, more open to error, less fixated on what I do know, and more respectful of what I don't. If this is a deterioration in my brain, then more, please.

"The problem is finding the space and time when this engagement stops, and calm, quiet, thinking and reading of longer-form arguments, novels, essays can begin. Worse, this also needs time for the mind to transition out of an instant gratification mode to me a more long-term, thoughtful calm. I find this takes at least a day of detox. Getting weekends back has helped. But if there were a way to channel the amazing insights of blogging into the longer, calmer modes of thinking ... we'd be getting somewhere.

"I'm working on it.”
― Andrew Sullivan

“You can look at the words on this paper and, because they are the ones I am used to choosing, they will show you the shape of me. I am here to be read in the way you might read the impression of my weight in a bed after a still night, a restless night, a night not alone.”
― A. L. Kennedy, Original Bliss

“Have more humility. Remember you don't know the limits of your own abilities. Successful or not, if you keep pushing beyond yourself, you will enrich your own life – and maybe even please a few strangers.”
― A.L. Kennedy

“Read. As much as you can. As deeply and widely and nourishingly and ­irritatingly as you can. And the good things will make you remember them, so you won't need to take notes.”
― A.L. Kennedy