“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means … Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Strait seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the Bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?”
Joan Didion
“I was playing bridge one evening with a musician, a chemistry teacher, and a painter when, during a particularly tense hand, a large porcelain bowl that we kept on the piano suddenly shattered. After we had all calmed ourselves down, we found four completely individual reactions.
Looking at all the tiny scattered pieces, I thought that I had never realized before how final a metaphor a broken bowl could be.
The chemistry teacher pointed out that someone had emptied an ashtray into the bowl with a cigarette still burning, and of course the heat had shattered the bowl.
The painter said that the green of the bowl was deepened when the light caught the small pieces.
The musician said that the sound it made when it broke was a G sharp.
Then we went back and finished our bridge hand.”
Shirley Jackson
To me, Instagram is the difference between traveling on a fucking high speed train out of Tokyo, where everything’s just flashing by in a second and you’ve forgotten it as soon as you saw it, as opposed to walking down the path to connect with the environment you’re in. In that quickness, we lose a little bit on the contemplative aspect. It desensitizes people. You lose complete perspective and the ability to look.
via Photographer Simon Harsent
Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.
– Jack Kerouac
"And what that has to do with the soul is this: You are part of it. I am part of it. Every human being is part of it. As soon as you are born, your parents start telling your story. As a child, you will skin your knee or walk naked into your parents’ dinner party; later you’ll suffer a broken heart, maybe hit the zone in your chosen sport, have children of your own. And that all becomes part of the human story. It folds into the Great Story Arc and alters it, if only very slightly. And there, in that blinding curve of energy that lasts forever—that is where your soul resides."
From My Drowning (And Other Inconveniences) by Tim Cahill
