“Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, became a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.” — Nora Ephron
HIGHLIGHTED LIFE: Be better than "busy" -
So, so true.
I hear it a couple times a day, “I have just been so busy” and it’s the most boring answer to the simple question of, “how are things going”. I have been running Fohr Card with Rich and Holly for 3 months full time now and people ask me all the time, “how are things?” and I make a…
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Following Your Bliss, Right Off the Cliff -
Pursuing a passion into a career change may bring the success you dream of. But disaster is also a possibility.
Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 94, E. L. Doctorow -
“You seem to think the writer has a choice—whether to work here or there or run off to a war. Maybe it’s an American middle-class question, because in most places writers don’t have a choice. If they grow up in the barrio, or get sent to the gulag, their experience is given to them whether they want it or not. Even here we respond to what’s given: I seem to be of a generation that has somehow missed the crucial collective experiences of our time. I was too young to understand the depression or fight in World War II. But I was past draft age for Vietnam. I’ve always been a loner. Perhaps for that reason I subscribe to what Henry James tries to indicate when he gives that wonderful example of a young woman who has led a sheltered life walking along beside an army barracks and hearing a snatch of soldier’s conversation coming through the window. On the basis of that, said James, if she’s a novelist she’s capable of going home and writing a perfectly accurate novel about army life. I’ve always subscribed to that idea. We’re supposed to be able to get into other skins. We’re supposed to be able to render experiences not our own and warrant times and places we haven’t seen. That’s one justification for art, isn’t it: to distribute the suffering? Writing teachers invariably tell students, Write about what you know. That’s, of course, what you have to do, but on the other hand, how do you know what you know until you’ve written it? Writing is knowing. What did Kafka know? The insurance business? So that kind of advice is foolish, because it presumes that you have to go out to a war to be able to do war. Well, some do and some don’t. I’ve had very little experience in my life. In fact, I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.”
This one is even better.
Richard Engel Reveals a Diary of His Syrian Kidnapping—and How His Captors Terrorized Their Victims -
Great read.
“What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks disappearing? - it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.” — On the Road
(via npr)