#story

I found that many gifted people are so afraid of writing a poor story that they cannot summon the nerve to write a single sentence for months. The thing to say to such people is: "See how *bad* a story you can write. See how dull you can be. Go ahead. That would be fun and interesting. I will give you ten dollars if you can write something thoroughly dull from beginning to end!" And of course, no one can. ↗

— Brenda Ueland

#art

We need the courage to learn from our past and not live in it. ↗

— Sharon Salzberg

#education #history #change

I don't deserve a girl like Hatsumi," Nagasawa once said to me. I had to agree with him. ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#love-story #lovers #love

Vielleicht gibt es ja gar keine tollen, wunderbaren Menschen. Und wir reden es uns für eine kurze Weile nur ein, dass der oder der toll und wunderbar ist, damit wir einen Grund haben, uns in ihn zu verlieben. Sozusagen ein Alibi für die Liebe. ↗

— Brigitte Blobel

#lies #love #love-story #love

Modern man has been in search of a new language of form to satisfy new longings and aspirations - longings for mental appeasement, aspirations to unity, harmony, serenity - an end to his alienation from nature. All these arts of remote times or strange cultures either give or suggest to the modern artist forms which he can adapt to his needs, the elements of a new iconography. ↗

— Herbert Read

#art

Not everyone believed in marriage then. To marry was to say you believed in the future and in the past, too - that history and tradition and hope could stay knit together to hold you up. ↗

— Paula McLain

#marriage #tradition #marriage

After 50 years together as a couple: "Look how fast the leaves are falling now," Alan says. "The trees will be bare in a couple of days. Do you realize that we have watched the leaves fall together for more than fifty autumns?" I stand quietly, looking at Alan, letting his words sink in. I am suddenly so moved. ↗

— Norman Sunshine

#double-life #love-story #norman-sunshine #life

Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her. ↗

— G.K. Chesterton

#love

To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense. ↗

— Henry Ford

#history #innovation #men

Why did she want to stay in England? Because the history she was interested in had happened here, and buried deep beneath her analytical mind was a tumbled heap of Englishness in all its glory, or kings and queens, of Runnymede and Shakespeare's London, of hansom cabs and Sherlock Holmes and Watson rattling off into the fog with cries of 'The game's afoot,' of civil wars bestrewing the green land with blood, of spinning jennies and spotted pigs and Churchill and his country standing small and alone against the might of Nazi Germany. It was a mystery to her how this benighted land had produced so many great men and women, and ruled a quarter of the world and spread its language and law and democracy across the planet. ↗

— Elizabeth Aston

#history #men