November 2011
2 posts
Quotes From a Movie
Name the movie…
I fixed that washing machine so that boy don’t need to tote that laundry no more.
***
Well I’m glad of it you was born.
***
It don’t make no difference where I was to be. We’ll always be friends. Can’t nobody stop that.
***
You know when you gotta feeling and you don’t know why?
Yessir.
I gotta feeling right now.
What kind of a...
October 2011
1 post
September 2011
1 post
“Previous research has shown that negative feedback can lead to increased...”
– The Creativity of Anger | Wired Science | Wired.com
August 2011
3 posts
“To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring...”
– Herman Melville, Moby Dick
“Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that...”
– Herman Melville, Moby Dick
“Every time we recall a memory we also remake it, subtly tweaking the neuronal...”
– Is Google Ruining Your Memory? | Wired Science | Wired.com
July 2011
2 posts
March 2011
1 post
“Pain is the purifier. Love pain. Embrace pain.”
– Percy Cerutty, famous Australian running coach
February 2011
1 post
January 2011
1 post
"Getting Closer" by Steven Millhauser →
The last paragraph strikes like a bat making contact with a baseball, sending it far over the outfield wall.
December 2010
5 posts
“Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal: my strength lies solely...”
– Louis Pasteur
November 2010
3 posts
Watch
October 2010
4 posts
I'm With Merlin On This One
merlin:
bobulate:
“Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”
— Stephen King
I’d agree with this if he’d substituted “exceptions” with “benefits.”
Rules that discourage people from learning new things produce better Maoists than writers.
[said the web’s most vocal fan of On Writing.]
September 2010
2 posts
July 2010
5 posts
“What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and...”
– Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Princeton University - 2010 Baccalaureate remarks
“Methinks that the moment my legs began to move, my thoughts began to flow.”
– Henry David Thoreau
The Tangled Mass of a Mess
There is a huge tarp covering a field, and I am at the edge of the tarp, on one side of the field, at one small point along the vast perimeter. It is so foggy outside that I cannot even see across the field. I can see about a hundred yards out and the rest is shrouded. But my suspicion is that the field is vast.
From beneath the edges of the tarp a few loose strands of fishing line are exposed....
“I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. I think the purpose of...”
– — Leo Rosten
(Indeed, Leo. Indeed. And the irony is that if you forget about trying to make yourself happy and instead focus on those other things—on compassion, on mattering, on couting, on making a difference that you lived at all—then you look up one day and lo and behold: you...
June 2010
7 posts
“Scientists at the institute are just starting to grapple with the seemingly...”
– Mapping the Human Brain : The Frontal Cortex
With so much complexity, so much could go wrong and you would never know it. Thinking that what you thought was what you think, that what you saw is what you see, misremembering the past, mistaking the present for the future, and that the dream is...
“Ahab speaks to the human need for finding meaning in suffering, to what he calls...”
– Delbanco in his biography of Melville (p 173)
“A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.”
– A quote from Gustav Mahler, which is akin to Moby-Dick: the novel that tries to be about everything.
via Infinite Zombies
“…Literature is the only available tool for the cognition of phenomena whose size...”
– Joseph Brodsky (via Instapaper)
“Placed at the beginning of the book, the extracts set a sort of tone. They...”
– Front Matter and End Matter « Infinite Zombies
Regarding the many pages of excerpts that Melville chose to kick off his epic tale…
(via Instapaper)
“Melville, it feels to me, was writing not only in his time, still so close to...”
– Interview: Dan Beachy-Quick « Infinite Zombies (via Instapaper)
May 2010
6 posts
“Marie Claire declares “Pretty is Back!”
That’s right,...”
– Merlin Mann
“You’ve gotta know not just how it looks and sounds to you. But you’ve gotta be...”
– David Foster Wallace.
Writers have two tracks constantly running in their minds: what they are saying/thinking, and what they suspect you are hearing/thinking, which can paralyze the tongue when the two tracks diverge, causing the poor writer to worry that his head might explode.
(via...
“So there begins to arise a disparity. On the one hand, this inferred biography...”
– Contested Will by James Shapiro reviewed by Charles Nicholl - TLS
I think we are all similarly bifurcated and if future scholars closely studied any one of us they might also begin to speculate whether we are not one, but two.
(via Instapaper)
“Samuele Marcora, a brilliant exercise scientist working at Bangor University in...”
– RUN: The Mind-Body Method Of Running By Feel
(via Instapaper)
Probably the most influential factor in *any* performance—not just exercise…
April 2010
2 posts
“Another spring in Boston and another great experience, yet I am hungrier than...”
– Boston 2010 - Ryan Hall
Distance Runners just…keep going.
Sistine Chapel →
Artistic passion defined…
March 2010
3 posts
WatchWhat’s Your Sentence?
(Note to self: Do not become a muddled paragraph).
February 2010
7 posts
