"And where would be the fun in making something you knew was going towork?"

"Do the stuff that only you can do. The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that's not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we've sounded like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That's the moment you may be starting to get it right. 

The things I've done that worked the best were the things I was the least certain about, the stories where I was sure they would either work, or more likely be the kinds of embarrassing failures people would gather together and talk about until the end of time. They always had that in common; looking back at them, people explain why they were inevitable successes. While I was doing them, I had no idea. I still don't. And where would be the fun in making something you knew was going to work?

And sometimes the things I did really didn't work. There are stories of mine that have never been reprinted. Some of them never even left the home. But I learned as much from them as I did from the things that worked."

From Neil Gaiman's Make Good Art speech. 

Love by Tolstoy

"Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow; but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them."

Leo Tolstoy 

Failure

"It is not our failures that define us but rather how we respond to our failures. We have the choice how to respond to what already happened." #NCC

Let it go

12 year old Lexi Walker and Alex Boye creating a new version of "Let it go" that I keep putting under my 'replay music' list.

"There are only two ways, really, to become a writer. One is to write. The other is to read."

"Read the greatest stuff but read the stuff that isn't too great, too. Great stuff is very discouraging. If you read only Beckett and Chekhov, you'll go away and only deliver telegrams at Western Union"

- Edward Albee

There are only two ways, really, to become a writer. One is to write. The other is to read. "The rest you learn from books."

How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen 

Love, said Edith Piaf

American journalist: If you were to give advice to a woman, what would it be?

Edith Piaf: Love.

American journalist: To a young girl?

Edith Piaf: Love.

American journalist: To a child?

Edith Piaf: Love.

From La Vie En Rose, about Edith Piaf

"to pay attention to the things I'll probably never need to know"

"It was for me the start of a lesson that I never stop having to learn: to pay attention to the things I'll probably never need to know, to listen carefully to the people who look as if they have nothing to teach me, to see school as something that goes on everywhere, all the time, not just in libraries but in parking lots, in airports, in trees. 

[...]

There's time in our lives when we all crave the answers. It seems terrifying not to know what's coming next. But there is another time, a better time, when we see our lives as a series of choices, and What now represents our excitement and our future, the very vitality of life. It's up to you to choose a life that will keep expanding. It takes discipline to remain curious: it takes work to be open to the world - but oh my friends, what noble and glorious work it is. Maybe this is the moment you shift from seeing What now as one more thing to check off the list and start to see it as two words worth living by. "

From What Now? By Ann Patchett

Love Is Really All That Matters

A group of Harvard researchers undertook a 75 year study to find the secrets to a fulfilling life. While the data they have collected has some limitations - it didn't include women, for starters, the Harvard Grant Study provides an unrivaled glimpse into a subset of humanity. The study followed 268 male Harvard undergraduates from the classes of 1938-1940 (now well into their 90s) for 75 years, collecting data on various aspects of their lives at regular intervals. And the conclusions are universal.

George Valliant, the Harvard psychiatrist who directed the study from 1972-2004 wrote a book (Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study) about it. But here are five lessons the Grant Study highlights.

#1 is "Love is Really All That Matters."

It may seem obvious, but that doesn't make it any less true: Love is key to a happy and fulfilling life. As Valliant puts it, there are two pillars to happiness. "One is love," he writes. "The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away."

Valliant said that the study's most important finding is that the only thing that matters in life is relationships. A man could have a successful career, money and good physical health, but without supportive, loving relationships, he wouldn't be happy ("Happiness is only the cart; Love is the horse").

From the article - "The 75-Year Study That Found The Secrets To a Fulfilling Life" by Carolyn Gregoire, The Huffington Post, August 11, 2013.

"But nothing important, or meaningful, or beautiful, or interesting, or great, ever came out of imitations."

"But nothing important, or meaningful, or beautiful, or interesting, or great, ever came out of imitations. What is really hard, and really amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.

More difficult because there is no zeitgeist to read, no template to follow, no mask to wear. Terrifying, actually, because it requires you to set aside what your friends expect, what your family and your co-workers demand, what your acquaintances require, to set aside the message this culture sends, through its advertising, it's entertainment, it's disdain, and it's disapproval, about how you should behave. 

[...]

'It is never too late to be what you might have been' by George Eliot "

From Being Perfect, by Anna Quindlen 

the pursuit of happiness

Christopher Gardner: It was right then that I started thinking about Thomas Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence and the part about our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And I remember thinking how did he know to put the pursuit part in there? That maybe happiness is something that we can only pursue and maybe we can actually never have it. No matter what. How did he know that?

The pursuit of happiness (movie)

"When people are willing to be brave and vulnerable."

"there’s not a talk I’ve seen where people really touch lives and made a huge difference where they were not excruciatingly vulnerable. The results that we see at TED, and the innovation, and the incredible music and the art is an expected outcome, in my opinion, of human potential when people are willing to be brave and vulnerable. The reason why this is so rare is not because of the human potential that’s here. It’s because of the willingness of the people who are here to be brave and vulnerable. We all have this capacity; it’s a bravery conference. There’s no one who’s up there, including myself, who hasn’t failed. And I seriously doubt there’s many people up there who haven’t been the subject of major, heartbreaking criticism."

Being vulnerable about vulnerability 

By Brene Brown

http://blog.ted.com/2012/03/16/being-vulnerable-about-vulnerability-qa-with-brene-brown/

http://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability?utm_source=email&source=email&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=ios-share

"an unexpected surprise"

Now this is creative in so many ways - from this source

To build and to destroy

"To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day."

Winston Churchill 

"Get a life."

"There are thousands of people out there with the same degree you have; when you get a job, there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living. But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just your life at a desk, or your life on the bus, or in the car, or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.

People don’t talk about the soul very much anymore. It’s so much easier to write a résumé than to craft a spirit. But a résumé is cold comfort on a winter night, or when you’re sad, or broke, or lonely, or when you’ve gotten back the chest X ray and it doesn’t look so good, or when the doctor writes “prognosis, poor.”

[...]

You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.

So I suppose the best piece of advice I could give anyone is pretty simple: get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house. Do you think you’d care so very much about those things if you developed an aneurysm one afternoon, or found a lump in your breast while in the shower?

Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over the dunes, a life in which you stop and watch how a red-tailed hawk circles over a pond and a stand of pines. Get a life in which you pay attention to the baby as she scowls with concentration when she tries to pick up a Cheerio with her thumb and first finger.

Turn off your cell phone. Turn off your regular phone, for that matter. Keep still. Be present.

Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work."

[...]

Get a life in which you are generous. Look around at the azaleas making fuchsia star bursts in spring; look at a full moon hanging silver in a black sky on a cold night. And realize that life is glorious, and that you have no business taking it for granted. Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around. Take the money you would have spent on beers in a bar and give it to charity. Work in a soup kitchen. Tutor a seventh-grader.

All of us want to do well. But if we do not do good, too, then doing well will never be enough.

[...]

It is so easy to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the pale new growth on an evergreen, the sheen of the limestone on Fifth Avenue, the color of our kids’ eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of live. Unless you know there is a clock ticking.

[…]

“Before” and “after” for me was not just before my mother’s illness and after her death. It was the dividing line between seeing the world in black and white, and in Technicolor. The lights came on, for the darkest possible reason.

And I went back to school and I looked around at all the kids I knew who found it kind of a drag and who weren’t sure if they could really hack it and who thought life was a bummer. And I knew that I had undergone a sea change. Because I was never again going to be able to see life as anything except a great gift."

From Brain Pickings article about Anna Quindlen's A Short Guide to a Happy Life

"Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined."

"Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you to another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours — long hallways and unforeseen stairwells — eventually puts you in the place you are now. Every choice lays down a trail of bread crumbs, so that when you look behind you there appears to be a very clear path that points straight to the place where you now stand. But when you look ahead there isn’t a bread crumb in sight — there are just a few shrubs, a bunch of trees, a handful of skittish woodland creatures. You glance from left to right and find no indication of which way you’re supposed to go. And so you stand there, sniffing at the wind, looking for directional clues in the growth patterns of moss, and you think, What now?"

Borrowing in part from great scientists and in part from great poets, Patchett advocates for embracing uncertainty as a positive force:

"Sometimes not having any idea where we’re going works out better than we could possibly have imagined."

From Brainpickings article about Ann Patchett's book What Now?

Mask

Nowadays

"Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing"

Oscar Wilde 

"But you can't step into the same river twice."

"What I love most about river is: you can't step in the same river twice. The water's always changing, always flowing. But people, I guess, can't live like that. We all must pay a price. To be safe - we lose our chance of ever knowing, what's around the riverbend. Waiting just around the riverbend."

From the Pocahontas, "Just around the riverbend"

"Do you hear the people sing?"

"Take my hand, and lead me to salvation, Take my love, for love is everlasting, and remember the truth that once was spoken: to love another person is to see the face of god"

"Do you hear the people sing? Lost in the valley of the night. It is the music of a people who are climbing to the light for the wretched of the earth there is a flame that never dies, even the darkest nights will end and the sun will rise. [...] Say, do you hear the distant drums? It is the future that they bring when tomorrow comes!"

From the Les Miserables Finale song/ originally from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

"That human life is but a first installment of the serial soul"

"That human life is but a first installment of the serial soul and that one's individual secret is not lost in the process of earthly dissolution, becomes something more than an optimistic conjecture, and even more than a matter of religious faith, when we remember that only commonsense rules immortality out. A creative writer, creative in the particular sense I am attempting to convey, cannot help feeling that in his rejecting the world of the matter-of-fact, in his taking sides with the irrational, the illogical, the inexplicable, and the fundamentally good, he is performing something similar in a rudimentary way to what [ two pages missing from the original document] under the cloudy skies of gray Venus."

"The Art of Literature and Commonsense" in Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov 1980

"The outcome of this war won't be decided tonight."

"We were talking about a cease fire, for Christmas Eve. What do you think? The outcome of this war won't be decided tonight. I don't think anyone would criticize us for laying down our riffles on Christmas Eve."

Joyeux Noel (2005)

"The effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable."

"After several years reporting on the field of psychology as a journalist, I finally realized that there might be [a different possibility for one to reach happiness]. I began to think that something united all those psychologists and philosophers - and even the occasional self-help guru - whose ideas seemed actually to hold water. The startling conclusion at which they all arrived, in different ways, was this: that the effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is our constant effort to eliminate the negative - insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness - that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy. Instead, they argued that it pointed to an alternative approach, a 'negative path' to happiness, that entailed taking a radically different stance towards those things that most of us spend our lives trying hard to avoid. It involved learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with familiar, even learning if value death. In short, all these people seemed to agree that in order to be truly happy, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions - or, at the very least, to learn to stop running quite so hard from them. Which is a bewildering thought, and one that calls into question not just our methods for achieving happiness, but also our assumptions about what 'happiness' really means."

From The Antidote: Happiness for People who Can't Stand Positive Thinking. By Oliver Burkeman. 

"There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change."

"It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake if intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers."

From The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. 

"Life is like riding a bicycle."

"Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you need to keep moving."

- Albert Einstein