Every thought a person dwells upon, whether he expresses it or not, either damages or improves his life.
Lucy Mallory
Quotes
Virtuosos do incredible things within preset conventions through maximizing technical or mechanical skills. Artists, on the other hand, reveal the staid conventions underlying cultural activity and posit a “solution” of rival conventions.
Links on Culture – November 2022 by W. David Marx
Students are not fools. They were, after all, once young children who if they reached too close to an open flame might well have gotten a smack on the hand, or a scary lecture about the dangers of third degree burns (skin grafts, my child, unimaginable pain) and never did it again. Decades later they too often apply those same lessons to writing: red ink = bad. Do not do that again. Which, in turn, risks molding a young writer into someone who forsakes creativity into someone whose core skill is avoiding pain.
Writerland Chapter 79: Don’t Be So Mean by Michael Shapiro
Emphasis mine.
It was the time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification and purples and golds burn in window-panes like the beat of an excitable heart; when for some reason the beauty of the world revealed and yet soon to perish […], the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
Breaking camp in this way always comes with a hop, skip and a jump! All of a sudden everything is different, and if you’re going to move on you’re careful to make use of every single minute, you pull up your tent pegs and douse the fire quickly before anyone can stop you or start asking questions, you start running, pulling on your rucksack as you go, and finally you’re on your way and suddenly quite calm, like a solitary tree with every single leaf completely still. Your camping-site is an empty rectangle of bleached grass. Late in the morning your friends wake and say: he’s gone away, autumn’s coming.
Moominvalley in November by Tove Jansson