Public Speaking
The human brain starts working the moment you are born and never stops until you stand up to speak in public.
The human brain starts working the moment you are born and never stops until you stand up to speak in public.
Bad things are not the worst things that can happen to us. NOTHING is the worst thing that can happen to us.
— Richard Bach
Both destiny’s kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person’s basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.
— David Foster Wallace
Listen to that still, quite voice in the back of the mind. It might be your destiny trying to get your attention.
We have to see, I think, that questioning the value of old rules is different from simply breaking them.
— Elizabeth Janeway, Between Myth & Morning: Women Awakening
A writer’s problem does not change. He himself changes and the world he lives in changes but his problem remains the same. It is always how to write truly and, having found what is true, to project it in such a way that it becomes part of the experience of the person who reads it.
— Ernest Hemingway
The writing bug has been tickling my fingertips again. What do I know to be true? And, having discovered what I know to be true, how do I explain it in such a way that the person who reads it understands it?
Stay tuned . . .
The severest test of a character is not so much the ability to keep a secret as it is when the secret is finally out, to refrain from disclosing that you knew it all along.
I suspect that this principle of character also applies to the ability to refrain from chiming in when someone in the room is explaining something and you can’t resist what you think is a better explanation. I know that is certainly one of my challenges.
Snow pounding. Visibility nil.
Windshield is as far as I can see.
Treacherously slow,
Sometimes lost.
I’ve even slid off off the road a time or two.
But as the hours (and days) pass,
I slowly make progress.
As it is in snow, so it is in life.