#things

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#create #cured #daring #disease #lives

Stories are a kind of thing, too. Stories and objects share something, a patina. I thought I had this clear, two years ago before I started, but I am no longer sure how this works. Perhaps a patina is a process of rubbing back so that the essential is revealed, the way that a striated stone tumbled in a river feels irreducible, the way that this netsuke of a fox has become little more than a memory of a nose and a tail. But it also seems additive, in the way that a piece of oak furniture gains over years and years of polishing, and the way the leaves of my medlar shine. ↗

— Edmund de Waal

#patina #stories #things #art

Big flashy things have my name written all over them. Well... not yet, give me time and a crayon. ↗

— Matt Smith

#big-flashy-things #doctor-who #humour #matt-smith #christmas

There are many things in your heart you can never tell to another person. They are you, your private joys and sorrows, and you can never tell them. You cheapen yourself, the inside of yourself, when you tell them. ↗

— Greta Garbo

#cheapen #heart #inside #joys #many

Joy is what happens to us when we allow ourselves to recognize how good things really are. ↗

— Marianne Williamson

#good #good things #happens #how #joy

He is my first olive: let me make a face while I swallow it. ↗

— Elizabeth Gaskell

#pretty-metaphors #metaphor

The books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him. … they stood in rows, weighing down his life like a possession which he did not succeed in subordinating to his personality. ↗

— Thomas Mann

#possessions #readers #reading #things #life

One of the most important things one can do in life is to brutally question every single thing you are taught. ↗

— Bryant H. McGill

#every #important #important things #life #most

Essential to life, is desiring the things that you need, than needing the things you desire. ↗

— Anthony Liccione

#life #need #things #vain #life

And what, O Queen, are those things that are dear to a man? Are they not bubbles? Is not ambition but an endless ladder by which no height is ever climbed till the last unreachable rung is mounted? For height leads on to height, and there is not resting-place among them, and rung doth grow upon rung, and there is no limit to the number. ↗

— H. Rider Haggard

#endeavors #greed #humanity #ladder #learning