James Richardson Quotes
-
What is more yours than what always holds you back?
→ -
All work is the avoidance of harder work.
→ -
Too much apology doubles the offense.
→ -
Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity, you make a new smear.
→ -
I would never accuse Willie Brown of slowing down, because he never does.
→ -
Anger has been ready to be angry.
→ -
Any virtue systematically applied becomes a vice. Morality is attention, not system.
→ -
I'm a kid checking mail, a kid on his cell with his questions: are we in love, Life, are we exclusive, are we forever?
→ -
Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?
→ -
Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.
→ -
The best way to know your faults is to notice which ones you accuse others of.
→ -
It is the empty seats that listen most raptly.
→ -
There are silences harder to take back than words.
→ -
I don't know what's meant by Know thyself, which seems to ask a window to look at a window.
→ -
Tyranny and fantasy both like to write everyone else's lines.
→ -
The happy and the suffering probably understand life equally well, but the sufferers may see a little more clearly how little it is that they understand.
→ -
Metaphor isn't just a fancy turn of speech. It shapes our thoughts and feelings, reaches out to grasp new experience, and even binds our five disparate senses. James Geary's fascinating and utterly readable I is an Other brings the news on metaphor from literature and economics, from neuroscience and politics, illuminating topics from consumer behavior to autism spectrum disorders to the evolution of language. As a writer, as a teacher, and as someone just plain fascinated by how our minds work, I've been waiting years for exactly this book.
→ -
Nothing important comes with instructions.
→ -
Reason is the lesser faith that steers us when we have already lost a greater one.
→ -
Sophistication is upscale conformity.
→ -
When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing.
→ -
Bitterness is a greater failure than failure.
→ -
If it can be used again, it is not wisdom but theory.
→ -
It is by now proverbial that every proverb has its opposite. For every Time is money there is a Stop and smell the roses. When someone says You never stand in the same river twice someone else has already replied There is nothing new under the sun. In the mind's arithmetic, 1 plus -1 equals 2. Truths are not quantities but scripts: Become for a moment the mind in which this is true.
→ -
How sure we are that everyone's watching. How sure we are that no one sees.
→ -
You have two kinds of secrets. The ones only you know. The ones only you don't.
→ -
They say productivity is the key to confidence, and confidence ... to productivity. And they're happy walking back and forth between these two rooms, each the excuse for the other.
→ -
Say too soon what you think and you will say what everyone else thinks.
→ -
If you do more than your share you'd better want to: otherwise, you're paying yourself in a currency recognized nowhere else.
→