Daniel R. > Daniel's Quotes

“When you make some great mistake,’ he philosophized, ‘it may very easily serve you better than the best-advised decision.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“The first time you meet Winston you see all his faults,’ she told him, ‘and the rest of your life you spend in discovering his virtues.”
― Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny

“Sometimes you need to scorch everything to the ground, and start over. After the burning the soil is richer, and new things can grow. People are like that, too. They start over. They find a way.”
― Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere

“Think of the corporate manager who gets two hundred emails per day and spends his time responding pell-mell to an incoherent press of demands. The way we experience this, often, is as a crisis of self-ownership: our attention isn’t simply ours to direct where we will, and we complain about it bitterly. Yet this same person may find himself checking his email frequently once he gets home or while on vacation. It becomes effortful for him to be fully present while giving his children a bath or taking a meal with his spouse. Our changing technological environment generates a need for ever more stimulation. The content of the stimulation almost becomes irrelevant. Our distractibility seems to indicate that we are agnostic on the question of what is worth paying attention to—that is, what to value.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

“Psychologists have suggested that attention may be categorized by whether it is goal-driven or stimulus-driven, corresponding to whether it is in the service of one’s own will or not.”
― Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

“Writing, regardless of the end result—whether good or bad, published or not, well reviewed or slammed—means celebrating beauty in an often ugly world.”
― Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir

“After a lifetime of hounding authors for advice, I've heard three truths from every mouth: (1) Writing is painful -- it's 'fun' only for novices, the very young, and hacks; (2) other than a few instances of luck, good work only comes through revision; (3) the best revisers often have reading habits that stretch back before the current age, which lends them a sense of history and raises their standards for quality.”
― Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir

“Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines -- it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“You know, I'm really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork quilt of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“If this sounds impressive to you, you’re over thirty.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“Why does the typical adventuring group consist of a wizard, a warrior, and a rogue, anyway? It should really be a wizard, a warrior, and a rich guy. Otherwise who's going to pay for all the swords and spells and hotel rooms?”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“Vision without execution is hallucination. .. Skill without imagination is barren. Leonardo [da Vinci] knew how to marry observation and imagination, which made him history’s consummate innovator.”
― Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci