#collect

When I was seventeen I found a man, or maybe he found me. Away from home for the first time, out of reach of my father’s archaic restrictions and my mother’s culinary insistence, I cut off my hair, dropped my Christian name, wore black and toyed with anorexia, passing incognito among the city workers, just another ant in that vast heap. ↗

— Nell Grey

#objects-of-desire #short-story-collection #solstice #home

To own a certain book - and to choose it without help - is to define yourself. ↗

— Julian Barnes

#collecting #reading #life

He needed the people and the clamour around him. There was no questions and no doubts when he stood on a platform over a sea of faces; the air was heavy, compact, saturated with a single solvent-admiration; there was no room for anything else. He was great; great as the number of people who told him so. He was right; right as the number of people who believed it. He looked at the faces, at the eyes, he saw himself born in them, he saw himself granted the gift of life. That was Peter Keating, that, the reflection in those staring pupils, and his body was only it's reflection. ↗

— Ayn Rand

#convention #society #life

When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others. Though we are often taught to think of ourselves as inherently selfish, the longing to act meaningfully in our work seems just as stubborn a part of our make-up as our appetite for status or money. It is because we are meaning-focused animals rather than simply materialistic ones that we can reasonably contemplate surrendering security for a career helping to bring drinking water to rural Malawi or might quit a job in consumer goods for one in cardiac nursing, aware that when it comes to improving the human condition a well-controlled defibrillator has the edge over even the finest biscuit. But we should be wary of restricting the idea of meaningful work too tightly, of focusing only on the doctors, the nuns of Kolkata or the Old Masters. There can be less exalted ways to contribute to the furtherance of the collective good.... ....An endeavor endowed with meaning may appear meaningful only when it proceeds briskly in the hands of a restricted number of actors and therefore where particular workers can make an imaginative connection between what they have done with their working days and their impact upon others. ↗

— Alain de Botton

#collective-good #connections #impact #jobs #meaning

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. ↗

— William Faulkner

#memory #recollection #belief

Over the years, I've collected a lot of musical friends. ↗

— Joshua Bell

#friends #i #lot #musical #over

Injustice, poverty, slavery, ignorance - these may be cured by reform or revolution. But men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals, individual and collective, a vast variety of them, seldom predictable, at times incompatible. ↗

— Isaiah Berlin

#cured #evils #fighting #goals #ignorance

The principle of responsibility and collective sanctions is incompatible with the Western concept of justice. ↗

— Omar Bongo

#concept #incompatible #justice #principle #responsibility

I have a good collection of cookery books. This is not so much because I like cooking, but because I like eating. ↗

— Louise Brown

#books #collection #cookery #cooking #eating

I've been writing an ongoing letter to my children since they were born, full of recollections of their childhoods. I've filled two journals. It's a great thing to do as a mother - you forget a lot as you go along, but reading over what you've written brings all the memories back. ↗

— Tory Burch

#back #been #born #brings #childhoods