Drowning Your Sorrows
People who drink to drown their sorrows should be told that sorrow knows how to swim.
— Ann Landers.
I gave my life to become the person I am right now.
Was it worth it?
— Richard Bach
Sometimes 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.”
If you cannot win, make the one ahead of you break the record.
— Jan McKeithen
Hope is the most powerful thing there is. It is the adrenalin of the soul.
— Amy Tan, from an interview on Change on To The Best of Our Knowledge
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
— Mark Twain
It seems as though Mark Twain was also inspired by the William Shedd quote I posted yesterday.
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
— Eleanor Roosevelt
Yesterday I quoted Martin Luther King, Jr. who said, “A man can’t ride your back unless it is bent.” In today’s quote, Eleanor Roosevelt conveys the same concept in a different voice.