#city

I am not eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of catfish. ↗

— Edith Sitwell

#eccentricity #eels #fish #individuality #individuality

Valentine whirled. Clary, lying half-conscious in the sand, her wrists and arms a screaming agony, stared defiantly back. For a moment their eyes met—and he looked at her, really looked at her, and she realized it was the first time her father had ever looked her in the face and seen her. The first and only time. “Clarissa,” he said. “What have you done?” Clary stretched out her hand, and with her finger she wrote in the sand at his feet. She didn’t draw runes. She drew words: the words he had said to her the first time he’d seen what she could do, when she’d drawn the rune that had destroyed his ship. MENE MENE TEKEL UPSHARIN. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#consciousness

Each man had only one genuine vocation - to find the way to himself....His task was to discover his own destiny - not an arbitrary one - and to live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity and fear of one's own inwardness. ↗

— Hermann Hesse

#self-discovery #synchronicity #work #destiny

Vices are simply overworked virtues, anyway. Economy and frugality are to be commended but follow them on in an increasing ratio and what do we find at the other end? A miser! If we overdo the using of spare moments we may find an invalid at the end, while perhaps if we allowed ourselves more idle time we would conserve our nervous strength and health to more than the value the work we could accomplish by emulating at all times the little busy bee. I once knew a woman, not very strong, who to the wonder of her friends went through a time of extraordinary hard work without any ill effects. I asked her for her secret and she told me that she was able to keep her health, under the strain, because she took 20 minutes, of each day in which to absolutely relax both mind and body. She did not even “set and think.” She lay at full length, every muscle and nerve relaxed and her mind as quiet as her body. This always relieved the strain and renewed her strength. ↗

— Laura Ingalls Wilder

#business

Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream. ↗

— Helen Keller

#dreams

Every solution to every problem is simple. It's the distance between the two where the mystery lies. ↗

— Derek Landy

#problems #simplicity #solutions #simplicity

I'm not a man. I have no male pride for you to trick me with, and I am not interested in single combat. That is entirely a weakness of your sex, not mine. I am a woman. I will use any weapon and all weapons to get what I want. ↗

— Cassandra Clare

#lilith #pride

Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly. ↗

— Mahatma Gandhi

#complicity #dissent #protest #truth-telling #silence

A child of five could understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five. ↗

— Groucho Marx

#simplicity #funny

Mass advertising can help build brands, but authenticity is what makes them last. If people believe they share values with a company, they will stay loyal to the brand. ↗

— Howard Schultz

#brand-loyalty #branding #advertising