"I consider myself successful only
when I do something that resembles the lack of order I sense".- Robert Rauschenberg

Sending art to a critic before you love it is like sending your fiancée to a gynecologist to certify her purity."

— Dave Hickey

H.D.T

“I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.”
— Franz Kafka

“We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?”

— Don DeLillo

“Having inner peace means committing to letting go of self-criticism and self-doubt. Everything other people say to you about yourself is a reflection of a voice within you. If you find people critical, first ask, is there a part of you that is criticizing yourself? As you let go of that self-criticism, you will experience less criticism from others.”

—

Orin

“The more you refrain from judging every event in your life as either good or bad and trust that good can come from any situation if you allow it, the more you open yourself up and allow yourself to attract that which will bring you joy.”

—	Drew Rozell

“Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.”

—	Henry Miller

“Some people say that the essence of butoh lies in the mechanism through which the dancers stops being himself and becomes someone or something else. This is a different conception of dance then the conventional where the body of the dancer expresses an emotion or abstract idea.

For example, take the studying of a rooster. “The idea was to push out all of the human inside and let the bird take its place. You may start by imitating, but imitation is not your final goal; when you believe you are thinking completely like a chicken you have succeeded.

The important thing with this is not the transformation into a chicken, but the transformation itself, the fact that you change. Only in this way you can bring the body back to its original state. It is not depiction or symbolization which is the foundation of butoh. It is the metamorphosis.”

-Harmen Sikkenga, from Butoh - Dance of Darkness 1994.

"You couldn't make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn't go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind."
— Elizabeth Strout (Olive Kitteridge)

She knows there’s no success like failure
And that failure’s no success at all.

— Bob Dylan, Love Minus Zero/No Limit

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.' We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we're liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

-Marianne Williamson (A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles"

“Writers get so fixated on the mechanics of writing that they forget how much they can learn from the other arts about line and the uses of space. Good writing, like a good watch, should have no unnecessary parts, and that’s what great art shouts at us: Tell the story with no unnecessary parts.”

—

William Zinsser inspired by simple geometry he saw in Matisse’s work. Every year he reads a sentence to his students, one that accompanied a panel where Matisse was quoted about his infatuation with what he called African cloths. Matisse said, “I never tire of looking at them for long periods of time and waiting for something to come to me from the mystery of their instinctive geometry.” Zinsser reads it to the students in his writing classes. “I don’t tell them what it means — how it might apply to their own writing — because I don’t know. I just want them to think about it.” He continues, “Think about it. Tell your story as plainly as you can, with no extra parts.”

"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."
— Jack Kerouac

“Where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”

—	Joseph Campbell

“ The implication of the mythic images is that deities are symbolic personifications of the very images that are of yourself. And those energies that are of yourself are the energies of the universe. And so the god is out there and the god is in here. The kingdom of heaven is within you, yes, but it’s also everywhere. ”

-Joseph Campbell

kevin

From December 22 to Christmas day, these people enacted the whole of Home Alone on Twitter.

“It’s important to get away from technology and experience the world. You’ve got to see your world, see your community, see what’s not being said what needs to be said. That’s probably the best way to figure out what you’re going to say. For me at least, it’s impossible to have any good ideas while sitting behind a computer. Ideas come from life. As Hemingway said, “I have to live to work.”

—	Jonathan Harris

J.D. Salinger died of natural causes at his home in New Hampshire on January 27, 2010 he was 91

“I hope to hell that when I do die somebody has the sense to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetary. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.”

—	J.D. Salinger, R.I.P.