Walking
My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She’s ninety-seven now, and we don’t know where the hell she is.
— Ellen DeGeneres
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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.”
Creating Opportunities
ByHeatherA wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
— Sir Francis Bacon
Write For Yourself
ByHeatherBetter to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
— Cyril Connolly
Cyril Conolly died three decades before Twitter was conceived. And yet, I can’t help but think that he would have echoed the same sentiments today.
Seize the Day
ByHeatherThis time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
Damn the Torpedos
ByHeatherDamn the torpedos, full speed ahead.
— David Farragut, Union Admiral during the American Civil War
On this date in 1862, David Farragut commanded a Union flotilla past two Confederate forts on the Mississippi River on his way to capture New Orleans. It wouldn’t be until more than two years later, at the Battle of Mobile Bay, when he would utter his famous phrase.