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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #ok
Remember, if you don’t do anything – if you don’t change the way your mind works and direct your subconscious mind to create the life you want – then everything stays the same, nothing changes. ↗
#inspirational #life-changing #mind-body-spirit #motivational #new-thought
Books can be immensely powerful. The ideas in them can change the way people think. Yet it was the Nazis and Stalin's officers who committed terrible crimes, and not Mein Kampf or the Communist Manifesto - and of course, the Manifesto contained many key ideas that are still relevant and important today, long after Stalin has gone. There is a crucial distinction between the book and its effect - it's crucial because if you talk about a book being harmful rather than its effect you begin to legitimise censorship. Abhorrent ideas need to be challenged by better ones, not banned. ↗
I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there, in prison, that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. I certainly wasn’t seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My home made education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London asking questions. One was, “What’s your alma mater?” I told him, “Books.” You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I’m not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man. ↗
Conservatism is far from what I’m aiming at in proclaiming the establishment of a Sethian left-hand path tradition in the West as one of the first missions of the SLM. In fact, in establishing such a tradition, true to the spirit of sacred transgression and holy subversion that is essential to both Seth and the left-hand path, we are opening a door that enlightens through endangerment, that awakens through risk and peril: this is a radical (from Latin radix, root, implying how deep a change is required) enterprise that is the very opposite of conservatism.” --“From the Eye of the Storm” (Zeena's column as Hemet-Neter Tepi Seth for the SLM), Volume I - Summer Solstice issue (2003): "Building a Sethian Left-Hand Path Tradition in the West. ↗
Massive changes may have occurred in libraries in recent years, with new digital resources and services supplementing the old traditional resources and services, the dog-eared card catalogues ripped up and destroyed, workstations suddenly everywhere, but one essential aspect of “libraryness” has not changed: libraries remain places dedicated to storage. Books continue to be published in greater and greater numbers – so great in fact that there are no accurate figures as to exactly how many are published: some say one every thirty seconds, others four thousand per day, others a million per year – and somehow, whether through the off-site storage of the physical books themselves, or microfilm copying, or digital scanning, we remain obliged to keep up with or afloat in this vast deluge of paper. Even the new, high-tech rebranded libraries opened to great fanfare in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets in the 1990s could not get away from this essential fact of paper hoarding: they were called “Idea Stores.” - p.56 ↗
Bad or good, movies nearly always have a strange diminishing effect on works of fantasy (of course there are exceptions; The Wizard of Oz is an example which springs immediately to mind). In discussions, people are willing to cast various parts endlessly. I've always thought Robert Duvall would make a splendid Randall Flagg, but I've heard people suggest such people as Clint Eastwood, Bruce Dern and Christopher Walken. They all sound good, just as Bruce Springsteen would seem to make an interesting Larry Underwood, if ever he chose to try acting (and, based on his videos, I think he would do very well ... although my personal choice would be Marshall Crenshaw). But in the end, I think it's best for Stu, Larry, Glen, Frannie, Ralph, Tom Cullen, Lloyd, and that dark fellow to belong to the reader, who will visualize them through the lens of the imagination in a vivid and constantly changing way no camera can duplicate. Movies, after all, are only an illusion of motion comprised of thousands of still photographs. The imagination, however, moves with its own tidal flow. Films, even the best of them, freeze fiction - anyone who has ever seen One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and then reads Ken Kesey's novel will find it hard or impossible not to see Jack Nicholson's face on Randle Patrick McMurphy. That is not necessarily bad ... but it is limiting. The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way. ↗
Even if you are alive somewhere, the absence of the other person who used to be there beside you obliterates your presence. Everything in the room, even the stars in the sky, can disappear in a second, changing one scene for another, just like in a dream. ↗
#death-of-a-loved-one #dreaming #hwang-sok-yong #loneliness #solitude
The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I’ll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction—until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define “literature”. The Latin root simply means “letters”. Those letters are either delivered—they connect with an audience—or they don’t. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that’s because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book. ↗
When I say 'I won't hurt you', it's a promise, which can and will be kept but it does not come from me without a breakdown of what it means. It does not mean we will never disagree, nor does it mean that you will always like everything which I say or do. It does not mean that you will never hurt yourself by behaving in a way which is damaging to a relationship or by behaving in a way which would ultimately result in my withdrawal from your life. What it does mean is that I can promise all that I expect in terms of loyalty, honor and respect. It means I am faithful. It also means that I will not intentionally or carelessly behave in a way which causes upset or doubt. It means, at the lowest level, 'You will break these terms before I do.' Communication is essential. Trust is paramount. Be completely honest and don't make promises that you can't keep, that's all. ↗
