#occupation

Doctors, dressed up in one professional costume or another, have been in busy practice since the earliest records of every culture on earth. It is hard to think of a more dependable or enduring occupation, harder still to imagine any future events leading to its extinction. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#any #been #busy #costume #culture

Much of today's public anxiety about science is the apprehension that we may forever be overlooking the whole by an endless, obsessive preoccupation with the parts. ↗

— Lewis Thomas

#anxiety #apprehension #endless #forever #may

There's a preoccupation with memory and the operation of memory and a rather rapacious interest in history. ↗

— Penelope Lively

#interest #memory #operation #preoccupation #rather

Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time. ↗

— Renata Adler

#bored #boredom #cruel #cruelty #great

Come, come, leave business to idlers, and wisdom to fools: they have need of 'em: wit be my faculty, and pleasure my occupation, and let father Time shake his glass. ↗

— William Congreve

#come #faculty #father #father time #fools

As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems. ↗

— Barbara Ehrenreich

#build #encampment #ever #ground #had

Today's preoccupation with physical theories of everything takes a wrong turn from the purpose of science - to question all things relentlessly. Modern physics has become like Swift's kingdom of Laputa, flying absurdly on an island above the earth and indifferent to what is beneath. ↗

— Robert Lanza

#absurdly #all things #become #beneath #earth

I spent my entire childhood living abroad because of my father's occupation, so we were on long-haul flights all the time. ↗

— Arabella Weir

#because #childhood #entire #father #flights

Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#artists #arts #careers #creativity #empowerment

The idea that you might end up in a job that doesn't allow you to be who you are, over the course of a lifetime, is still one of the most chilling nightmares to me. It's a good metaphor for fears I have about losing my soul in some accidental, mundane way. So, to me, these jobs that my characters have are very loaded. They immediately suggest a complex character to me, a woman who is, say, a secretary, but also a vigilante on behalf of her own soul. ↗

— Miranda July

#writing-craft #metaphor