“He’s such a generous spirit, you’d be embarrassed to behave in a small way around him.”
Tobias Wolff
more infosource: describing writer George Saunders, in “George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year,” by Joel Lovell, New York Times Magazine, January 3, 2013.
category: generosity, goodness, integrity
medium: Magazine profile
“Slowly now, nice neat letters:
the point is to do things well,
not just to do them.”
Antonio Machado
more infosource: Antonio Machado: Selected Poems, trans. by Alan S. Trueblood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 183.
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category: craft, integrity, lettering, quality
medium: Poem
“When I was a little kid, there were still blacksmiths around, and I’ve never forgotten the ring of a real hammer on a real anvil.”
Saul Bellow
more infosource: written in a letter to Philip Roth, letting him know his stories are the “real thing,” dated December 12, 1969, in Saul Bellow: Letters (New York: Viking, 2010), 290.
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category: authenticity, blacksmith, childhood, craft, handmade, integrity, tool
medium: letter
“It’s easier to hold to your principles 100% of the time than it is to hold to them 98% of the time. If you give in to ‘just this once,’ based on a marginal cost analysis, as some of my former classmates have done, you’ll regret where you end up. You’ve got to define for yourself what you stand for and draw the line in a safe place.”
Clayton M. Christensen
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integrity