#ties

Learning to read music in Braille & play by ear helped me develop a [very] good memory. ↗

— Ray Charles

#music #music

Laws of nature have no physical properties of mass /energy. They are platonic truths in transcendent realm that create & govern the Universe. ↗

— Deepak Chopra

#creation #creativity #deepak-chopra #energy #govern

Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. ↗

— Don DeLillo

#delillo #literature #terror #nature

[...] I daily wished more to please him; but to do so, I felt daily more and more that I must disown half my nature, stifle half my faculties, wrest my tastes from their original bent, force myself to the adoption of pursuits for which I had no natural vocation. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#faculties #servitude #nature

Why then seek to complete in a few decades what took the other nations of the world thousands of years? Why, in your hurry to subdue and utilize nature, squander her splendid gifts? You have opportunities such as mankind has never had before, and may never have again. ↗

— James Bryce

#nation-building #nature #opportunities #time #nature

What is a genius? A person who demands little to nothing from others, but is often found extremely difficult to have around. ↗

— Criss Jami

#creative #different #difficulties #distinction #envy

You can't talk about fucking in America, people say you're dirty. But if you talk about killing somebody, that's cool. ↗

— Richard Pryor

#free-speech #pornography #priorities #sex #violence

It is a long-cherished tradition among a certain type of military thinker that huge casualties are the main thing. If they are on the other side then this is a valuable bonus. ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#casualties #military #strategy #tactics #war

This was how it was with travel: one city gives you gifts, another robs you. One gives you the heart’s affections, the other destroys your soul. Cities and countries are as alive, as feeling, as fickle and uncertain as people. Their degrees of love and devotion are as varying as with any human relation. Just as one is good, another is bad. ↗

— Roman Payne

#bad #cities #cities-and-countries #city #good

The more I write stories for young people, and the more young readers I meet, the more I'm struck by how much kids long to see themselves in stories. To see their identities and perspectives—their avatars—on the page. Not as issues to be addressed or as icons for social commentary, but simply as people who get to do cool things in amazing worlds. Yes, all the “issue” books are great and have a place in literature, but it's a different and wildly joyous gift to find yourself on the pages of an entertainment, experiencing the thrills and chills of a world more adventurous than our own. And when you see that as a writer, you quickly realize that you don't want to be the jerk who says to a young reader, “Sorry, kid. You don't get to exist in story; you're too different.” You don't want to be part of our present dystopia that tells kids that if they just stopped being who they are they could have a story written about them, too. That's the role of the bad guy in the dystopian stories, right? Given a choice, I'd rather be the storyteller who says every kid can have a chance to star. - posted at Kirkus Review in post "Straight-Laced Dystopias ↗

— Paolo Bacigalupi

#lgbtq #minorities #representation #teens #writing