February 2012
55 posts
“Scientists do not trust what is intuitively obvious, because intuitively obvious...”
– Carl Sagan - Wonder and Skepticism. (via scipsy)
It is strangely reassuring to be able to tell yourself that the only thing that’s sure is change — not just in organisms but in what we know and think we know. But it implies an ongoing exercise in keeping your mind open, even as time and...
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“We already know that language is special; no other aspect of cognition...”
– Jessica Love compares mathematics to language. (via theamericanscholar)
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“Whenever the brain wants to retain something, it relies on just a handful of...”
– “The Forgetting Pill Erases Painful Memories Forever”, Wired
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Stephen Sondheim on Leonard Bernstein
Terry Gross: Did you learn anything working with Bernstein and watching him work?
Stephen Sondheim: Oh, sure. A great deal. Yes. Mainly I learned something about courage. I learned – Lenny was never afraid to make big mistakes. He was never afraid to fall off the top rung of the ladder and I learned by implication that the worst thing you can do is fall off a low rung. If you're going to make a mistake, make a huge one.
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Memes of Perception
It’s a tribute to what reality TV and transparency-obsessed culture have done to us that we’ve now got memes like this: tongue-in-cheek productions that let you see all sides of what we do. Our perception is pitted against others’, and however successful any perception is at proliferating, the reality remains, fixed, stark, and laughable from the outside. You know it,...
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Imagination and Inspiration →
writersbane:
Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.
WILLIAM BLAKE
An idea, like a ghost, must be spoken to a little before it will explain itself.
CHARLES DICKENS
If writers had to wait until their precious psyches were completely serene there wouldn’t be much writing done.
WILLIAM STYRON
I sit in the dark and wait for a...
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“At best, we nurture the fantasy that knowledge is always cumulative, and...”
– Kathryn Schulz and 150 other big thinkers each pick one scientific concept to improve your cognitive toolkit. (via curiositycounts)
“Every book better be fully intimate, it better be all you have. I’m obviously...”
– Nathan Englander on writing fiction. (via nprfreshair)
Sometime, I would like to be able to write something that makes me feel real. Like fiction.
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Darwin
I try to think of this every day. When things feel unstable, it is comfort. It encourages me to just keep going and not overanalyze, not stand in the pool waiting for the typhoon of feelings to come and swallow me. It is okay to keep going. It is life.
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Love in pools shallow + deep
Me: “I think our babies will be beautiful.”
Him: “Too beautiful.”
Me: “Sometimes I worry that I’m too confident of this and…”
Him: “…they’ll come out ugly?”
Me: “Yeah. What do we do then?”
Him: “I told you not to worry about this. We’ll just drown them.”
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Henry Miller's Commandments on Work
adverve:
This is mainly about writing, but it basically applies to anything creative: that weird mixture of burying yourself in something but coming up enough for air that the work you love remains a pleasure. Ties in nicely with what Jonah Lehrer said last year, at Cannes Lions, about the science of creativity.
Via the Shakespeare & Company Facebook Page.
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“The triumphs of science are due to the substitution of observation and inference...”
– ‘The impact of science on society’ by Bertrand Russell, p.89.
And a few pages above Russell write:
I am constantly asked: What can you, with your cold rationalism, offer to the seeker after salvation that is comparable to the cozy homelike comfort of a fenced-in dogmatic creed?
To this the...
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“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the...”
– Franz Kafka (via troubled)
“Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a...”
– House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (via couturetionist)
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