#oh

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don’t have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself. ↗

— Ray Bradbury

#henry-james #john-irving #library #information

They're professionals at this in Russia, so no matter how many Jell-O shots or Jager shooters you might have downed at college mixers, no matter how good a drinker you might think you are, don't forget that the Russians - any Russian - can drink you under the table. ↗

— Anthony Bourdain

#drinking #drunk #liquor #russia #russian

What else is there to do in college except drink beer or slit one's wrists? ↗

— Bret Easton Ellis

#college #suicide #college

But in college, we can wear our alcohol abuse as proudly as our university sweatshirts; the two concepts are virtually synonymous. ↗

— Koren Zailckas

#college #college

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary. ↗

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#carbohydrates #diabesity #dr-hyman #dr-robert-lustig #labor

Truth is the same always. Whoever ponders it will get the same answer. Buddha got it. Patanjali got it. Jesus got it. Mohammed got it. The answer is the same, but the method of working it out may vary this way or that. (115) ↗

— Swami Satchidananda

#jesus #mohammed #patanjali #truth #yoga

A president who is burdened with a failed and unpopular war, and who has lost the trust of the country, simply can no longer govern. He is destined to become as much a failure as his war. ↗

— Glenn Greenwald

#governance #iraq-war #lyndon-b-johnson #politics #united-states

Where now are the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing? Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing? Where is the harp on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing? Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing? They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow; The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow. Who shall gather the smoke of the deadwood burning, Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning? ↗

— J.R.R. Tolkien

#theoden #tolkien #spring

And I wanted to tell her that the pleasure for me wasn't planning or doing or leaving; the pleasure was in seeing our strings cross and separate and then come back together. ↗

— John Green

#paper #towns #pleasure

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught - in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too - in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. there is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well - or ill? ↗

— John Steinbeck

#evil #good #john-steinbeck #story #change