Magic is a vanishing art
Magic is a vanishing art.
— Bumper Sticker
There is an inescapable setup time for all tasks, large or minuscule in scale. It is often the same for one as it is for a hundred. There is a psychological switching of gears that can require up to 45 minutes to resume a major task that has been interrupted.
— Timothy Ferris, 4-Hour Work Week
Of course, I interrupted the book I was reading to post and Tweet this.
Focus is hard.
I want to beg you as much as I can . . . to be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything.
Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your innermost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
The sooner you fall behind, the more time you will have to catch up.
— Unknown
When you live in times of authoritarian rule one of the first things that end up in the cross hairs is culture. We believe firmly that artists and writers and dramatists and actors and musicians play a vital role in defending the integrity of who we are as human beings.
— Jeremy Scahill, on the Trump’s Cabinet of Killers and Why Orange is the New Anti-Black episode of The Intercepted.
I have never been more grateful for organizations like the ACLU and the plethora of lawyers we have in this country. Likewise, I am inspired by the power of our marches and protests as we stand up for our values. But, in addition to the direct tangible actions we can take, we also need a 100 million voices writing and singing and laughing and, in general, sounding our barbaric yawps over the roofs of the world.
— John Kenneth Galbraith, economist