52 quotes found
"When you discard arrogance, complexity, and a few other things that get in the way, sooner or later you discover that simple, childlike, and mysterious secret known to those of the Uncarved Block: Life is Fun."
"Now one rather annoying thing about scholars is that they are always using Big Words that some of us can't understand...and one sometimes gets the impression that those intimidating words are there to keep us from understanding. That way, the scholars can appear Superior, and will not likely be suspected of Not Knowing Something. After all, from the scholarly point of view, it's practically a crime not to know everything."
"Now, scholars can be very useful and necessary, in their own dull and unamusing way. They provide a lot of information. It's just that there is Something more, and that Something More is what life is really all about."
"Cleverness, after all, has its limitations. Its mechanical judgments and clever remarks tend to prove inaccurate with passing time, because it doesn't look very deeply into things to begin with."
"Practically speaking, if timesaving devices really saved time, there would be more time available to us now than ever before in history. But, strangely enough, we seem to have less time than even a few years ago. It's really great fun to go someplace where there are no timesaving devices because, when you do, you find that you have lots of time. Elsewhere, you're too busy working to pay for machines to save you time so you won't have to work so hard."
"The Christmas presents once opened are Not So Much Fun as they were while we were in the process of examining, lifting, shaking, thinking about, and opening them. Three hundred sixty-five days later, we try again and find that the same thing has happened. Each time the goal is reached, it becomes Not So Much Fun, and we're off to reach the next one, then the next one, then the next."
"What could we call the moment before we begin to eat the honey? Some would call it anticipation, but we think it's more than that. We would call it awareness. It's when we become happy and realize it, if only for an instant. By Enjoying the Process, we can stretch that awareness out so that it's no longer a moment, but covers the whole thing. Then we can have a lot of fun. Just like Pooh."
"In order to take control of our lives and accomplish something of lasting value, sooner or later we need to Believe. We don't need to shift our responsibilities onto the shoulders of some deified Spiritual Superman, or sit around and wait for Fate to come knocking at the door. We simply need to believe in the power that's within us, and use it. When we do that, and stop imitating others and competing against them, things begin to work for us."
"Do you really want to be happy? You can begin by being appreciative of who you are and what you've got. Do you want to be really miserable? You can begin by being discontented."
"Abstract cleverness of the mind only separates the thinker from the world of reality, and that world, the Forest of Real Life, is in a desperate condition now because of too many who think too much and care too little. In spite of what many minds have thought themselves into believing, that mistake cannot continue for much longer if everything is going to survive. The one chance we have to avoid certain disaster is to change our approach, and learn to value wisdom and contentment. These are things that are being searched for anyway, through Knowledge and Cleverness, but they do not come from Knowledge and Cleverness. They never have, and they never will. We can no longer afford to look so desperately hard for something in the wrong way and in the wrong place. If Knowledge and Cleverness are allowed to go on wrecking things, they will before much longer destroy all life on this earth as we know it, and what little may temporarily survive will not be worth looking at, even if it were possible for us to do so."
"There is something in each of us that wants us to be unhappy. It creates in our imaginations problems that don't exist - quite often causing them to be true. It exaggerates problems that are already there. It reinforces low self-esteem and lack of respect for others. It destroys pride in workmanship, order, and cleanliness. It turns meetings into Confrontations, expectations into Dread, opportunities into Danger, stepping stones into Stumbling Blocks. It can be seen at work in grimaces and frowns, which pull the muscles of the face forward and down, speeding the aging process. It contaminates the mind behind the face with its negative energy and spreads outward, like a disease. And then it comes back, projected and reflected by other unhappy minds and faces. And on it goes."
"Eeyores are Realists, they say. But reality is what one makes it. And the more negative reality one nurtures and creates, the more of it one has."
"Without difficulties, life would be like a stream without rocks and curves - about as interesting as concrete. Without problems, there can be no personal growth, no group achievement, no progress for humanity. But what matters about problems is what one does with them. Eeyores don't overcome problems. No, it's the other way around."
"In reality, heroes are heroic because they, despite their weaknesses - and sometimes because of them - do great things. If they were perfect, they wouldn't be here in earth's classroom."
"When a stream comes to some stones in its path, it doesn't struggle to remove them, or fight against them, or think about them. It just goes around them. And as it does, it sings. Water responds to What's There with effortless action."
"What can be just as hard to see as problems-in-the-making is that a good many "problems" aren't really problems to begin with. People who don't see situations for what they are often struggle against difficulties that aren't there and create difficulties in the process. Or turn small difficulties into large ones."
"Transforming negative into positive, you work with whatever comes your way. If others throw bricks at you, build a house. If they throw tomatoes, start a vegetable stand. You can often change a situation simply by changing your attitude toward it."
"It’s hard to write too overtly about racism without coming across as heavy-handed or didactic. But if you’re too subtle, there’s the sense that you’re side-stepping the issue. Still, I’ve learned to write about hot button topics in more oblique ways, mostly by looking at people’s “innocent” assumptions about each other…"
"I never intended to write solely about Arab characters, or even primarily about them, but because they were such a big part of my first two novels and my memoir, people reckoned that was my main literary terrain. It wasn’t really a deliberate decision to move away from Arab characters in my later books, but more a desire to paint on a broader canvas, one that was closer to my day-to-day experience."
"…I think that was really important growing up around story tellers like my dad and my uncles. I think it instilled a love of the beauty of the spoken story. Also, my mother was a reading teacher. She brought home a lot of fables and fairy tales, which also have an oral tradition behind them. It was a combination of those things that brought me the desire to tell stories, as opposed to a love of the beauty of writing."
"…I pretended I didn't understand Arabic when he spoke to me in public places. Because when I was a younger child, Arabic was a secret code in the family - I think that’s true for a lot of immigrant families. But then I didn't want to speak Arabic. I didn't want to be different from my friends at all…"
"I think that's what most writers do. They sit down and concentrate. It's as if you tap into your alpha waves. Otherwise, your mind is constantly wandering a the world calls out to it. That's ordinary, everyday consciousness. But I believe that the consciousness from which creativity comes is this intensity of focus that is the result of practice. Sylvia Plath wrote exercise poems. Writing poetry is itself a form of exercise, a discipline as much as it is a calling and an art. And a discipline always asks for exercise. I tell my students that you can't read about playing tennis in a book and then go out and be a good tennis player. You have to be out there hitting that ball and hitting it again and again to become the best tennis player possible. So if you want to be a good poet, you have to be working and working and working on the craft. Practice. Practice. Practice."
""Lament" is in some ways a praise song, a love poem to the English language, which, together with other languages like Spanish and Chinese, I continue to view as a wonderful achievement of the human species. The English language is capable of overcoming the separate identities that divide us even as it sometimes is deployed in erecting those separations."
"Familial relationships are never simple, are they? I think if you had a simple family life, you would have been very lucky. Love is so complicated. My father loved us, but he beat us! How do you come to terms with this very loving man who also was an abusive man?"
"There's so much of this mixing occurring all over the world, and the political stability and openness to the transformations that are happening here are not in place yet. America allows it to happen, although not without pain."
"The sooner you learn that you have to be independent, that you are alone, and if there are people to help you it's a blessing, but it's not a given-I think this is the beginning of strength and wisdom."
"Poetry is what has saved me through the years. I started writing when I was about nine. I discovered that I could go into a space where there is language-language that is mine, which is completely private and where I can do anything with it. I can curse at someone I cannot curse otherwise. I can create a space of beauty when all around me is poverty and deprivation. I can experience an uplifting of the spirit when all around me things are trying to pull me down. That act of writing the poem is the act that has centered me all my life."
"The political and social struggle for civil rights itself can transform the outsider into a citizen."
"Home and place are where we humans are grounded."
"(What does that say about the creative process of poetry?) I suppose it is an example of the inexplicability of the creative process. It works through ordinary feelings, familiar relationships, even when it sets itself a grand or historical challenge. But it seizes on what is hidden from everyday view, the strangeness in our dailiness that we need to make meaning of or for. The creative process is uncanny. It remains unknowable because it works with the not yet known. As for the conditions that support creativity, I know what I need as a poet. I need time-quiet time-and pen and paper."
"It is poetry, she says, that helped the rebellious and restless nomad find herself and her place. "Listening and telling my own stories," she says, "I am moving home.""
"I really don’t worry about labels. Writers worry about syntax, voice, setting or landscape, plot, and the arch of the story. We worry about craft, the art of the writing."
"Writing is a form of activism. Again, let’s not separate into small boxes, ‘activism’ versus writing. Native people, I think, prefer to think in more holistic terms. A story is active and a story changes the world. A story is changing the world as I write this."
"We are still a ‘vacant map’ as Native writers of Native literature. But, a story chooses a writer, not the other way around. So I believe we write, perform, because we must. Nothing else is of importance. Native writers will grow and develop as the stories search them out. That’s exciting and the stories will change the world."
"Humor defuses pain. Humor gives the narrators in my stories agency to tilt at the ever-whirling windmills of colonization. Humor opens a window on historic pain and trauma that American Indians dealt with at the hands of the federal government. Loss of land, loss of dignity, loss of identity, and of course the loss of a brother or sister, parent—which in my great grandmother’s era was a common event."
"Working in all kinds of situations helps a writer make sense of the world. At least it did for me. But fewer and fewer writers haven’t worked outside of a university or college environment."
"I do think that reading aloud, or performing one’s own work is very helpful to the writing process. You can hear the voices you are creating, see the scenes you’ve created, and where the text falters."
"I think most really good teachers, or professors, prepare for their classes as any writer/performer does. You write and then learn your lines, you draw your students into the performance or lecture just as any performer does, and you write a conclusion to the day’s performance or lesson just as any performer does."
"Learning is supposed to be fun, (or funny) dramatic, and full of irony. A performance."
"I think the way I come at a story has always been from thinking about the past, (American Indian history, my family’s history, my tribe’s history) and how the present and future are shaped by the past. Put another way, I am certain that we humans live in past, present, and future all at the same time."
"If it seems like a contradiction, it is. But that is the basis for all stories."
"When I decided it was time to get a journalist to look at what I have always held as a wrongful conviction, I did it thinking that reporters can go places most of us can’t. They have ways of tracking down information, getting people to talk, and resources the average person doesn’t."
"For any and every wrongfully convicted person, you can assume almost everything went wrong."
"What she did do successfully was blow wide open the idea of a fair criminal justice process. She brought to light questions of religious and ethnic bias, prosecutorial misconduct, police manipulation of witnesses, reasonable doubt, evidential reliability, ineffective assistance of counsel, maximum sentences, juvenile detention, and appellate logjams."
"You know, anybody can write a memoir of their life in so many different ways, right? It can be about my career. It can be about advocacy work. It can be about so many things."
"And when you've been carrying that around, like, your entire adult life, it feels quite amazing to be able to finally put it down and check it off your list."
"The word "civilization" apparently first appeared in a French book in the mid-eighteenth century (L'Ami des hommes (1756) by Victor de Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau, the father of the French revolutionary politician). Since then, it has had close associations with the West's sense of its own superiority. In order to see the past clearly, we must try to avoid this assumption built into the word."
"Talking with a younger generation of readers, I see how Shelley has become increasingly a European figure, a Dante among English poets, and an image of Faustian daring, whose writing and travels still inspire that primary spirit of adventure into a wider world of ideal possibilities. Nothing is so moving to the as finding an old copy of his book in a stranger's hands, battered and wine-stained from its voyages, its margins scrawled, its poetry underlined, its pages bent with maps and postcards, its cover bleached with sun and sea."
"The had promulgated an essentially private, elitist, specialist form of knowledge. Its ' was Latin, and its common currency mathematics. Its audience was a small (if international) circle of s and savants. Romantic science, on the other hand, had a new commitment to explain, to educate, to communicate to a general public. This became the first great age of the public scientific lecture, the laboratory demonstration and the introductory textbook, often written by women. It was the age when science began to be taught to children, and the ‘experimental method' became the basis of a new, secular , in which the infinite (whether divine or not) were increasingly valued for their own sake."
"At eighteen, just out of and desperate for freedom, I set off alone wandering around France for several months. My mother sent me her old copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s ', as a kind of good-luck charm. A little red with a tiny map in the front. I still have it. Suddenly I thought, Here is the map and this is the journey I must make. So I went down through the , following Stevenson’s track, on foot with a , sleeping rough—but no donkey. It only lasted a couple of weeks, but for me, it was tough, very lonely, a kind of initiation. The is like a French version of the , wild and remote. I saw no one for days, but I somehow believed I saw Stevenson and met him. I slept à la belle toile and bathed in the mountain streams. I had a for fifty s in my shoe. I started keeping a notebook about Stevenson’s trip, and that’s how it all began."
"It is a brilliant vignette, prompting a meditation on the role of memory in biographical writing, and an exploration of the things that get forgotten in the writing of lives. Throughout This Long Pursuit, Holmes moves between reflections on the subjects of his career as a and sketches of himself at work. We see him lecturing on Coleridge at the , scribbling at a table in the , scurrying from the with a glossy catalogue under his arm and newly discovered stories brimming in his mind. The result is a glorious series of essays on the art of life writing and a worthy successor to his earlier volumes on the craft, and ’."
"Holmes is not offering a history of either or its technologies. The and are barely mentioned (perhaps because they feature in The Age of Wonder). What we have instead is a "cluster of balloon stories" drawn from life and fiction, and more from life than from fiction. Some of the footnotes are anecdotal, but the book itself is more than that; Holmes is a distinguished with a fine sense of how individual lives reflect and redirect the larger forces that flow through and around them."