#auto

Yet the Narrator’s quest is not only for his own identity and vocation. He seeks an understanding of art, sexuality and worldly and political affairs: he is a snoop and a voyeur; he comments and classifies; his taxonomic impulse makes the novel appear to be a vast compendium, replete with burrowing wasps and bedsteads, military strategies, stereoscopes, asparagus and aeroplanes. ↗

— Adam A. Watt

#gnothi-seauton #know-thyself #knowledge #proust #art

And [Asimov]'ll sign anything, hardbacks, softbacks, other people's books, scraps of paper. Inevitably someone handed him a blank check on the occasion when I was there, and he signed that without as much as a waver to his smile — except that he signed: 'Harlan Ellison. ↗

— Isaac Asimov

#convention #fame #science-fiction #self-referential #science

Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you. You must travel it by yourself. It is not far. It is within reach. Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know. Perhaps it is everywhere - on water and land. ↗

— Walt Whitman

#journey #self-reliance #travel

Silence in the shell of a city, no baby crying, no car honking, no ambulance shrieking, no lovers moaning, no drunks throwing up in the alley, no lights, nothing but wind and rain and snow in its season and rust and a rattling of open doors and carcass smell. It was a possibility like a brain tumor or a scorpion bite. ↗

— Anne Roiphe

#art-and-madness #autobiographical #art

If the thing you want beyond anything cannot be, it is much better to recognize it and go forward, instead of dwelling on one's regrets and hopes. ↗

— Agatha Christie

#dreams #inspirational #life #dreams

How happy is the little stone That rambles in the road alone, And doesn't care about careers, And exigencies never fears; Whose coat of elemental brown A passing universe put on; And independent as the sun, Associates or glows alone, Fulfilling absolute decree In casual simplicity. ↗

— Emily Dickinson

#poems #poetry #career

The proverb warns that, 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself. ↗

— Thomas Stephen Szasz

#independence #self-reliance #independence

I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph. ↗

— Shirley Temple

#asked #autograph #believing #claus #department

Because you've got guy parts, you're automatically a better mechanic than me? I don't think so," Eve said, and bailed out of the passenger side. ↗

— Rachel Caine

#eve-rosser #gender-stereotypes #morganville-vampires #sexism #shane-collins

The anarchist conclusion is that every kind of human activity should begin from what from what is local and immediate, should link in a network with no centre and no directing agency, hiving off new cells as the original grows. ↗

— Colin Ward

#autonomy #federalism #organisation #anarchism