September 2011
“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
—C.S. Lewis (via parkstepp)
“Dharma is in your mind, not in the forest. Don’t believe others, just listen to your mind. You don’t have to go anywhere else. Wisdom is in yourself, just like a sweet ripe mango is already in a young green one.”
—Ajahn Chah (via illuminatedbeing)
"Rosebud is a sled, bitches!" New study shows knowing what happens in a story actually increases our enjoyment →
salon.com
Why, when the notion that ignorance is bliss is so pervasive, would knowing how the story turns out be such a pleasure enhancer? Leavitt suggests that comfort is a factor. “It could be that once you know how it turns out,” he told Science Daily, “it’s cognitively easier — you’re more comfortable processing the information — and can focus on a deeper understanding of the story.” It certainly makes a reader less likely to skim through the first 400 pages of a Harry Potter installment if she’s already taken a leisurely eyeful of the ending. And Christenfeld added that perhaps the action is only part of the story. “Plots are just excuses for great writing,” he said. “What the plot is is (almost) irrelevant. The pleasure is in the writing.”
Pretty sure David Shields says the same thing in Reality Hunger, and in his piece, “Long Live the Anti-Novel, Built from Scraps: “Plots are for dead people.”
Thx, @mattforsythe!
“He in his madness prays for storms, and dreams that storms will bring him peace.”
—Tolstoy (via phoosh)
“In the end
these things matter most:
How well did you love?
How fully did you live?
How deeply did you let go?”
— Siddhārtha Gautama” —(via journalofanobody)
these things matter most:
How well did you love?
How fully did you live?
How deeply did you let go?”
— Siddhārtha Gautama” —(via journalofanobody)
“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. The brave may not live forever, but the cautious do not live at all. From now on you’ll be traveling the road between who you think you are and who you can be. The key is to allow yourself to make the journey.”
—Meg Cabot (via atomos)
“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”
—Henry David Thoreau, Journal, August 5, 1851 (via liquidnight)
“We’re fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance.”
—
Japanese Proverb
(via thoughtsdetained)
“The wound is the place where the light enters you.”
—Rumi (via elemenop)
“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.”
—Lao Tzu (via iheartmyart, 23rd-block)
“Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever. Must have been shattering, stamped into one’s memory. And yet, I can’t remember it. It never occurred to me at all. We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there’s only one direction, and time is its only measure.”
—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard (via fuckyeahexistentialism)
“Grace is what matters. In anything. Especially life, especially growth, tragedy, pain, love, death. About people, that’s what matters. That’s a quality I admire very greatly. It keeps you from reaching for the gun too quickly; it keeps you from destroying things too foolishly; it sort of keeps you alive and keeps you open for more understanding.”
—Jeff Buckley (via alles-und-nichts)
“
Love and violence, properly speaking, are polar opposites. Love lets the other be, but with affection and concern. Violence attempts to constrain the other’s freedom, to force him to act in the way we desire, but with ultimate lack of concern, with indifference to the other’s own existence or destiny.
We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
” —R.D. Laing (via fuckyeahexistentialism)
“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
—Aristotle (via n0ctilucent)
