Quotes
Twenty
“I had a personal realization recently: kottke.org isn’t so much a thing I’m making but a process I’m going through. A journey.”
— kottke
“A Left-Handed Commencement Address” (Mills College, 1983)
“I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is. Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing — instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there. Not in the sky full of orbiting spy-eyes and weaponry, but in the earth we have looked down upon. Not from above, but from below. Not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.”
David O’Reilly on making sure you keep going
- “What’s something you wish someone told you when you started making art?”
…practical and digital and language…
“I studied the classical effects from classical films. I don’t know only the new techniques, I know the old techniques. When you were talking about compositing an image, the language is still the same – matte lines, roto, matte paintings. You’re using the same language as before. Grain, haze, atmospheric dispersion, specularity – the language is the same.”
Ikigai
Our dreams are, generally, us imagining ourselves from the outside, not the inside. This can never be experienced and, because of that, “following one’s dreams” is usually a necessarily fruitless activity. Even in the best of circumstances, it is not a source of well-being or comfort.
And although we’re often told, “You can do anything you set your mind to!”, it’s just not true. People CAN’T do anything they set their minds to. The physicality of my vocal chords make it so that I will never sing like Adele. My height precludes me from being a basketball star. My age and ethnicity prevent me from ever being a member of South Korean boy band BTS, no matter how much I set my mind to it.
If you discover what you’re truly good at, and what you enjoy doing, and it’s something you can potentially make a living at – well, that, to me, is a much richer life than following your dreams, which are not only unfullfilling, but they shift and change throughout your life anyway. Because to achieve a dream is one thing, but to live inside a dream that you discover moment by moment along your path, where you grow stronger and wiser, and enhance the lives of those around you – well, that’s a much deeper, more fulfilling life.
to “all those who of set purpose choose to walk alone, who know the special grace attaching to it”
Nature’s particular gift to the walker, through the semi-mechanical act of walking — a gift no other form of exercise seems to transmit in the same high degree — is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted, a little mad maybe — certainly creative and suprasensitive, until at last it really seems to be outside of you and as if it were talking to you whilst you are talking back to it. Then everything gradually seems to join in, sun and the wind, the white road and the dusty hedges, the spirit of the season, whichever that may be, the friendly old earth that is pushing life firth of every sort under your feet or spell-bound in a death-like winter trance, till you walk in the midst of a blessed company, immersed in a dream-talk far transcending any possible human conversation. Time enough, later, for that…; here and now, the mind has shaken off its harness, is snorting and kicking up heels like a colt in a meadow.–
nobody-but-yourself
A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words.
This may sound easy. It isn’t.
A lot of people think or believe or know they feel — but that’s thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling — not knowing or believing or thinking.
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.
“All fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life—science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of these metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.
A metaphor for what?
If I could have said it non-metaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel…”
– Ursula K. Le Guin, 1976 Foreword to The Left Hand of Darkness (via Nearlya)
Paul Greer 