Bad Tenants
Underground nuclear testing, defoliation of the rain forests, toxic waste … Let’s put it this way: if the world were a big apartment, we wouldn’t get our deposit back.
— John Ross
Similar Posts
All Power Corrupts
ByHeatherAll power corrupts, but we need the electricity.
— Unknown
Three Hardest Tasks
ByHeatherThe three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements but moral acts:
- to return love for hate
- to include the excluded
- and to say “I was wrong.”
— Sydney J. Harris, Pieces of Eight
Dysfunction
ByHeatherThe descent into dysfunction is a long, slow process. At no point is there a conscious choice to be dysfunctional.
— Unknown, possibly original
Don’t say you don’t have enough time
ByHeatherDon’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.
Despite my obsession for productivity, I often find myself struggling to stay focused. I find this quote inspirational, especially on days when I have frittered away have of a morning on mundane tasks. Think bigger. Think beyond the moment. Follow your passions.
More Steinbeck on Writing
ByHeatherSometimes in a man or a woman an awareness takes place — not very often and always inexplainable. There are no words for it because there is no one ever to tell. This is a secret not kept a secret, but locked in wordlessness. The craft or art of writing is the clumsy attempt to find symbols for the wordlessness. In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplainable. And sometimes if he is very fortunate and if the time is right, a very little of what he is trying to do trickles through.
— John Steinbeck, Journals of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters
This is another installment from Steinbeck’s journals written as he was giving birth to East of Eden. It has echos from my Julian Schnabel quote when he said “That is true about all art. The conflict is to try and take what is inside of you and put it inside somebody else.”