Len Edgerly > Len's Quotes

“I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't
you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write”
― W.S. Merwin, Opening the Hand

“Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.”
― Ezra Pound

“I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.”
― Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

“By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules.”
― Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games

“When you’re sick and dying, the ego is and should be the first thing to go. I know there’re gurus who teach people how to release the ego, to conquer the ego. I get it now, but I didn’t back when I was healthy. It’s moot now. The guy who falls off the toilet and knocks himself out no longer has an ego.”
― J.R. Rain, Silent Echo

“Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies—it happens when society adopts new behaviors.”
― Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

“I've been reading eBooks since my first Palm Pilot in 1999.”
― Anonymous

“I very frequently get the question: 'What's going to change in the next 10 years?' And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one. I almost never get the question: 'What's not going to change in the next 10 years?' And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two -- because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. ... [I]n our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It's impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, 'Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,' [or] 'I love Amazon; I just wish you'd deliver a little more slowly.' Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”
― Jeff Bezos

“People who are right most of the time are people who change their minds often.”
― Jeff Bezos

“Undertakings based on an inner tenacity have to be mute and obscure; one has only to declare or glory in them and it all appears silly, without meaning, even petty.”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron In The Trees

“To ripen into an elder, into a being that is more than simply elderly and more than only self, is a deliberate, thoughtful, sustained choice that arises from the intention to see things as they are.”
― Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging: Awaken as You Grow Older

“Usually, the student’s own response to a particular educational setting is the best guide to the quality of its fit. In good-fitting environments, children with dyslexia are challenged, but the challenges are matched to their individual needs, abilities, and states of development, and they’re increased one small step at a time so that goals remain obtainable.”
― Brock L. Eide, The Dyslexic Advantage: Unlocking the Hidden Potential of the Dyslexic Brain

“Trust yourself. Taking in the good helps you see the good in yourself, and in the world and other people.”
― Rick Hanson, Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence

“There is no last page to the poetry of John Ashbery. You will have had the experience; you can always have it again.”
― John Ashbery, Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works

“This distinction is made in the Chinese language between shuohua (speaking) and t’anhua (conversation), which implies the discourse is more chatty and leisurely and the topics of conversation are more trivial and less business-like.”
― Tom Hodgkinson, How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto