#w

Even painfully shy and awkward people are not painfully shy or awkward when they are alone. The way to access this natural, comfortable alone-self when you are with others is by choosing to forbid yourself to wonder what "they" are thinking. Instead, force yourself to exist in the instant, then take it- and give it- as it comes. ↗

— Augusten Burroughs

#awkward #comfortable #confidence #shy #nature

Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009) ↗

— Haruki Murakami

#truth #writers #writing #nature

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#realism #writing #nature

By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world. The foe long since in silence slept; Alike the conqueror silent sleeps; And Time the ruined bridge has swept Down the dark stream which seaward creeps. On this green bank, by this soft stream, We set to-day a votive stone; That memory may their deed redeem, When, like our sires, our sons are gone. Spirit, that made those heroes dare To die, and leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare The shaft we raise to them and thee. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#shot-heard-around-the-world #nature

Zackary Connor's office building was made of glass, endless windows giving the impression of being outside. It was exactly how I liked nature--air conditioned and bug free. ↗

— Caroline Hanson

#nature

For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads, ‘We came in peace for all Mankind.’ As the United States was dropping seven and a half megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock. ↗

— Carl Sagan

#human #human-nature #moon #war #nature

Judges... are picked out from the most dextrous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office. ↗

— Jonathan Swift

#nature

In the nonstop tsunami of global information, librarians provide us with floaties and teach us to swim. ↗

— Linton Weeks

#libraries #washington-post #information

So all night long the storm roared on: The morning broke without a sun; In tiny spherule traced with lines Of Nature’s geometric signs, In starry flake, and pellicle, All day the hoary meteor fell; And, when the second morning shone, We looked upon a world unknown, On nothing we could call our own. Around the glistening wonder bent The blue walls of the firmament, No cloud above, no earth below,— A universe of sky and snow! ↗

— John Greenleaf Whittier

#snow #nature

...you’d be amazed at the grand tales the human brain will throw up to make sense of something nonsensical. ↗

— Dianna Hardy

#human-behaviour #human-nature #logic #making-sense-of-the-world #nonsense