"We have to be constantly jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down."

"A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved."

"The good earth - we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy."

"We have to be constantly jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down."

From If This isn't nice, What is?: Advice for the Young by Kurt Vonnegut

"You will regret the small thing you didn't say for the rest of your life. Say thank you."

Dear Sugar,

I read your column religiously. I'm twenty-two. From what I can tell by your writing, you're in your early forties. My question is short and sweet: What would you tell your twentysomething self if you could talk to her now?

Love,
Seeking Wisdom

Dear Seeking Wisdom,

Stop worrying about whether you're fat. You're not fat. Or rather, you're sometimes a little bit fat, but who gives a shit? There is nothing more boring and fruitless than a woman lamenting the fact that her stomach is round. Feed yourself. Literally. The sort of people worthy of your love will love you more for this, sweet pea.  [...]

There are some things you can't understand yet. Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding. It's good you've worked hard to resolve childhood issues while in your twenties, but understand what you resolve will need to be resolved again. And again. You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness. [...]

Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. Your are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday You don't know what it is yet.

You cannot convince people to love you. This is an absolute rule. No one will ever give you love because you want him or her to give in. Real love moves freely in both directions. Don't waste your time on anything else.

Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.

One hot afternoon during the era in which you've gotten yourself ridiculously tangled up with heroin, you will be riding the bus and thinking what a worthless piece of crap you are when a little girl will get on the bus holding the strings of two purple balloons. She'll offer you one of the balloons, but you won't take it because you believe you no longer have a right to such tiny beautiful things. You're wrong. You do.

Your assumption about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naive pomposity. Many people you believe to be rich are not rich. Many people you think have it easy worked hard for what they got. Many people you think have it easy worked hard for what they got. Many people who seem to be gliding right along have suffered and are suffering. Many people who appear to be old and stupidly saddled down with kids and cars and houses were once every bit as hip and pompous as you. [...]

The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people's diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. Those things are you becoming.

One Christmas at the very beginning of your twenties when your mother gives you a warm coat that saved you months to buy, don't look at her skeptically after she tells you she thought the coat was perfect for you. Don't hold it up and say it's longer than you like your coats to be and too puffy and possibly even too warm. Your mother will be dead by spring. That coat will be the last gift she gave you. You will regret the small thing you didn't say for the rest of your life.

Say thank you.

Yours,
Sugar

From  Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed

"This is not rocket science here, people. Start with time for what'smost important."

"Terry Monaghan's approach to time management is simple: You can't manage time. Time never changes. There will always and ever be 168 hours in a week. What you can manage are the activities you choose to do in time. And what busy and overwhelmed people need to realize, she said, is that you will never be able to do everything you think you need, want, or should do. "When we die, the e-mail in-box will still be full. The to-do list will still be there. But you won't," she told us. "Eighty-percent of the email that comes in is crap anyway, and it takes you the equivalent of nineteen and a half weeks a year just to sort through. Eighty percent of your to-do list is crap. Look, the stuff of life never ends. That is life. You will never clear your plate so you can finally allow yourself to get the good stuff. So you have to decide. What do you want to accomplish in this life? What's important to you right now? And realize that what's important now may not be two years from now. It's always changing."

Monaghan looks at us starting forlornly at our blank Perfect Schedules. She sighs. "This is not rocket science here, people," she says. "Start with time for what's most important."

But that's where I got stuck. Everything seemed important. My work. My family. My friends. My community. Changing the kitty litter. Sorting my daughter's Barbie shoes. Keeping the incoming tide if clutter in the house at bay....

P.256

"The essence of their advice all seemed to boil down to what my kids learned in preschool: Plan. Do. Review. Take time to figure out what's important in the moment and what you want to accomplish in life. If you're ambivalent, notice it. Pick something anyway. Embrace it. Play. Try one approach. Assess. If that isn't working, ditch it and play with something else. Keep yourself accountable but enjoy the process. There is no right answer. This is life."

P.266

"Working continuously, without breaks, is in fact a surefire way to produce subpar work. Scientists have long known that, during sleep, the brain consolidates new information and skills by making new connections between neurons, effectively rewiring the brain. Neuroscientists in Sydney have found that that rewiring happens during the day as well, when we take a break. [...] Pulsing - deactivating and reactivating the brain - actually makes it pay better attention. The brain evolved to detect and respond to change, always alert to danger."

"Breaks also inspire creativity. Scientists have found that people who take time to daydream score higher on tests of creativity. And there's a very good biochemical reason why your best ideas and those flashes of insight tend to come not when you've got your nose to the grindstone, oh ideal worker, but in the shower."

P.267-8

"But as our time horizons grow shorter [as we grow older and realize we have only a short amount of time left in life], we start to see the world differently. We start to see that what matters most are often the simple things - the smell of roses, watching your grandchildren splash in a puddle, the smile on a face of an old friend you're meeting for coffee. It's those little moments that you start to focus on." And by focusing on what's important and beauty of the small moments, she said. Older people are actually happier.

P.272

"Be silent everyday. Even if that means taking five breaths. Being mindful for less than a half hour a day will, literally, expand your brain."

"Choose ONE thing that's most important to do every day."

"Find Your Own Private Netherlands."

"Understand the story that drives your flavor of "not enough." Notice it. Get clear about how you define success, what you want and your time horizon. As Steve Jobs said, "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life."

"Banish busyness."

"Live an authentic life."

P279-286 - Appendix: Do One Thing

From Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play when No One Has The Time. By Brigid Schulte. 

"Sooner or later, the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing."

From Introduction of the Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey

"Sooner or later," V.S. Pritchett wrote in 1941 essay, "the great men turn out to be all alike. They never stop working. They never lose a minute. It is very depressing." But this is not all completely true with all artists. Every artists had a different routine but a very unique one.

"In that sense, this is a superficial book. It's about the circumstances of creative activity, not the product; it deals with manufacturing rather than meaning. But it's also, inevitably, personal. My underlying concerns in the book are issues that I struggle with in my own life: How do you do meaningful creative work while also earning a living? Is it better to devote yourself wholly to a project or to set aside a small portion of each day? And when there doesn't seem to be enough time for all you hope to accomplish, must you give things up (sleep, income, a clean house), or can you learn to condense activities, to do more in less time, to "work smarter, not harder," as my dad is always telling me? More broadly are comfort and creativity incompatible, or is the opposite true: Is finding a basic level of daily comfort a prerequisite for sustained creative work?"

Below is a selection of random quotes from the book.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

"Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straight forward life is not possible then one must try to wriggle through by subtle maneuvers."

William James (1842-1910)

"The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation."

Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007)

"Do you know what moviemaking is?" Bergman asked in a 1964 interview. "Eight hours of hard work each day to get three minutes of film. And during those eight hours there are maybe only ten or twelve minutes, if you're lucky, of real creation. And maybe they don't come. Then you have to gear yourself for another eight hours and pray you're going to get your good ten minutes this time."

John Adams (b. 1947)

"My experience has been that most really serious creative people I know have very, very routine and not particularly glamorous work habits," Adams said in a recent interview. "Because creativity, particularity the kind of work I do - which is writing large-scale pieces, either symphonic music or opera music -s is just, it's very labor-intensive. And it's something that you can't do with an assistant. You have to do it all by yourself."

Arthur Miller (1915-2005)

"I wish I had a routine for writing," Miller told an interviewer in 1999. "I get up in the morning and I go out to my studio and I write. And then I tear it up! That's the routine, really. Then, occasionally, something sticks. And then I follow that. The only image I can think of is a man walking around with an iron rod in his hand during a lightning storm."

"A friend, above all, is somebody who does not judge you."

"A friend, above all, is somebody who does not judge you. I have told you that he is somebody who opens his doors to the vagabond, with his crutch, with his stick, which he has set down in a corner and he does not ask him to dance, so that he can judge his dance. And if the vagabond tells of the spring he passed on the road outside, a friend is somebody who welcomes the spring within him. And if he tells of the horror of the famine in the village he comes from, he suffers that famine with him. For I have told you, the friend in the man, is the part that is for you and that opens a door for you which he may possibly never open anywhere else. Your friend is true and all that he says is true, and he loves you even if he hates you in the other house. And the friend in the temple is he who, thank God, I brush past and meet, he who turns to me the same face as my own, lit up by the same God, for then unity is achieved, even if elsewhere, he is a shopkeeper, while I am a captain, or a gardener while I am a sailor on the sea. Over and beyond our discussions, I have found him and his friend. And I can be silent near him, that is to say, not fear anything from him concerning my interior gardens and my mountains and my ravines and my deserts, for he won't place his feet there. You, my friend, what you receive from me with love is like the ambassador of my interior empire. And you treat it well and you let it sit down and you listen to it. And we are happy."

Wisdom of the Sands - Saint Exupery

From Saint Exupery: Art, Writing and Musings by Nathalie Des Vallieres

"That smile saved me."

"Then the miracle happened. Oh! a very discreet miracle. I had no cigarette. As one of my guards was smoking, I asked him, by gesture, showing the vestige of a smile, if he would give me one. The man first stretched himself, slowly passed his hand across his brow, raised his eyes, no longer to my tie but to my face, and, to my great astonishment, he also attempted a smile. It was like the dawning of the day.

This miracle did not conclude the tragedy, it removed it altogether, as light does shadow. There had been no tragedy. This miracle altered nothing visible. The feeble oil lamp, the table scattered with papers, the men propped against the wall, the colors, the smell, everything remained unchanged. Yet everything was transformed in its very substance. That smile saved me. It was a sign just as final, as obvious in its future consequences, as unchangeable as the rising of the sun. It marked the beginning of a new era. Nothing had changed, everything was changed. The table scattered with papers became alive. The oil lamp became alive. The walls were alive. The boredom dripping from every lifeless thing in that cellar grew lighter as if by magic. It seemed that an invisible stream of blood had started flowing again, connecting all things in the same body, and restoring to them their significance.

The men had not moved either, but, though a minute earlier they had seemed to be farther away from me than an antediluvian species, now they grew into contemporary life. I had an extraordinary feeling of presence. That is it: of presence. And I was aware of a connection.

The boy who had smiled at me, and who, until a few minutes before, had been nothing but a function, a tool, a kind of monstrous insect, appeared now rather awkward, almost shy, of a wonderful shyness — that terrorist! He was no less a brute than any other. But the revelation of the man in him shed such a light upon his vulnerable side! We men assume haughty airs, but within the depth of our hearts, we know hesitation, doubt, grief.

Nothing had yet been said. Yet everything was resolved."

From Brainpicking "How a Smile Saved Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Life: A Soul-Lifting Meditation on Our Shared Humanity" Letter to a Hostage by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

"Without time to reflect, to live fully present in the moment and face what is transcendent about our lives, we are doomed to live in purposeless and banal busyness."

"Everywhere, even in rural America it seems, people strive to be busy. They tell pollsters they're too busy to register to vote. To look busy and important - or because they can't help themselves -people obsessively check their smartphones every ten minutes. In surveys, people say they're too busy to make friends outside the office, too busy to date, too busy to sleep, and too busy to have sex. Eight in ten Britons report being too busy to eat dessert, even though four in ten say dessert is better than sex. We're in such a rush that the typical sound bite for a presidential candidate has been compressed from forty seconds in 1968 to 7.3 seconds in 2000.

Remember those unused vacation days? People say they're too busy to take vacation and too busy for a lunch break. [...] Being superbusy has become so normal that it's now a joke.

[But] Life in the early twenty-first century wasn't supposed to be so busy. [...] In the 1950s, work hours did finally begin to fall. Leisure time was on the rise. "So my question," Ben Hunnicutt told me, "is what the hell happened?"

Without time to reflect, to live fully present in the moment and face what is transcendent about our lives, Ben Hunnicutt says, we are doomed to live in purposeless and banal busyness. 'Then we starve the capacity we have to love,' he said. 'It creates this "unique heart," as Saint Augustine said, that is ever desperate for fulfillment."

p. 48-53

From Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One has the Time by Brigid Schulte

Stop living a "koyaanisqatsi" life, and start living a "profiter" life

"Profiter"- (v) to make the most of an opportunity, to savor life around you. (French)

- From a friend

"Koyaanisqatsi" - life out of balance, a way of living that calls for another way of living. (Hopi Langugae) 

- From the Second Wind: Navigating the passage to a slower, deeper, and more connected life. By Dr. Bill Thomas. 

"what people say doesn't mean much. It's what they do that predicts thefuture."

"A fifth lesson is that what goes right is more important than what goes wrong, and that it is the quality of child's total experience, not any particular trauma or any particular relationship, that exerts the clearest influence on adult psychology. [...]

A sixth lesson is that if you follow lives long enough, they change and so do factors that affect healthy adjustment. Our journeys through this world are filled with discontinuities. Nobody in the Study was doomed at the outset, but nobody had it made, either. Inheriting the genes for alcoholism can turn the most otherwise blessed golden boy into a trainwreck. Conversely, an encounter with a very dangerous disease liberated the pitiful young Dr. Camille from life of dependency and loneliness." (P.52)

"And we found that the fifty-nine men with the warmest childhoods made 50 percent more money than the sixty-three men with the bleakest childhoods." (113)

"Remember, Garrick was only the first of the men to reach ninety-five [...]. Can we learn anything from Daniel Garrick's life about the keys to graceful aging? [...] He certainly didn't follow most of the conventional "rules" for long life. His parents were not long-lived

. [..] He didn't really start to exercise until he was almost sixty. He smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for twenty years, and nine pipes a day for decades after that. During his sixties, he drank enough that he and his future wife worried about it. [... But] Remember, way back in college he had bicycled 5 miles back and forth to class after being up all night and had gotten top marks for being "well integrated" and "self-starting," both traits associated with longevity in the Study. 

From the very beginning Garrick had a quality of indomitability, and maybe that was really what enabled him to live so long. Nobody in the Grant Study waited longer or worked harder than he did to get a college education. [...] He never gave up, and he never have up hope." (239-240)

"As I keep reminding myself, what people say doesn't mean much. It's what they do that predicts the future. It was the facts of people's long-term love relationships, not their belief systems, that showed us what we needed to know first about their capacity to love, and then about their mental health." (353)

"This extraordinary telescope has brought great joy and meaning into my life. [...] And I become more and more aware that the Study, and the work we've done with it, has encouraged other people to think about their own lives and the lives of others. Not statistically, perhaps, but with a little more curiosity and a little more interest and a little more kindness. And how can that hurt?" (370)

- My new all-time favorite book. 

Triumphs of Experience: The Men of The Harvard Grant Study by George E. Vaillant

"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. 

"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 

"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 

"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

"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 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.