#originality

You couldn't get more original than Laura. Laura. Yes, she was an original, all right. One of a kind. Did they break her mold or what, pal? Or...or did it self-destruct? Still, Laura. The one and the only. Such a plain name for a unique cutie. But perhaps my acuity is not without its problems. I ruin everything: a stupid story to be tapped out on my tomb's stone. I ruined even Laura. And an original ruin is rare. Just ask the archaeologist, "Egypt, again?" Just ask me, "Laura, again?" and we'll both respond: "Yes, again and again. And again. ↗

— Vladimir Nabokov

#love #original #originality #love

A fruit salad is delicious precisely because each fruit maintains its own flavor. ↗

— Sean Covey

#fruit-salad #originality #teen

Any fool can do something cool and look cool, but it takes skill to make something uncool cool again. ↗

— Criss Jami

#cool #coolness #fool #independence #individuality

There’s a Greek legend—no, it’s in something Plato wrote—about how true lovers are really two halves of the same person. It says that people wander around searching for their other half, and when they find him or her, they are finally whole and perfect. The thing that gets me is that the story says that originally all people were really pairs of people, joined back to back, and that some of the pairs were man and man, some woman and woman, and others man and woman. What happened was that all of these double people went to war with the gods, and the gods, to punish them, split them all in two. That’s why some lovers are heterosexual and some are homosexual, female and female, or male and male. ↗

— Nancy Garden

#lesbian #lgbt #mythology #originality

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about. ↗

— W. H. Auden

#aim #always #authenticity #bother #confuse

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment. ↗

— Josh Billings

#achieve #any #good #good judgment #honestly

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature. ↗

— Jean Cocteau

#commonplace #did #done #effect #freshness

When I was coming up, we weren't trying to get a hit or get paid, we were just trying to do our thing. The only thing we were really trying to do was to be recognized for our originality. ↗

— Bootsy Collins

#get #hit #i #just #only

The principle mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers. ↗

— Arthur Koestler

#genius #mark #new #opening #originality

The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know. ↗

— Arthur Koestler

#forgetting #know #moment #originality #prerequisite