“To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his or her work for peace.”
Thomas Merton
more infosource: Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (New York: Doubleday, 2009), 81.
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category: activist, balance, demand, peace, school of life, time, violence
medium: nonfiction
“The feel of things, if I cherish, helps me live more like a minute than a clock.”
Bob Hicok
more infosource: This Clumsy Living (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007 ), 27.
category: cherish, tactile, time
medium: Poetry
“Digging, raking, hoeing. Pruning a shaggy rose: shaping for future splendour. Dividing fat clumps of snowdrops: out of many shall come more still. And that was—is—the miraculous power of gardening: it evokes tomorrow, it is eternally forward-looking, it invites plans and ambitions, creativity, expectation. Next year I will try celeriac. And that new pale blue sweet pea. Would Iris stylosa do just here? Gardening defies time; you labour today in the interests of tomorrow; you think in seasons to come, cutting down the border this autumn but with next spring in your mind’s eye.”
Penelope Lively
more infosource: “‘So this is old age,'” The Guardian, October 4, 2013.
category: future, gardening, nature, time
medium: Newspaper essay
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.”
Annie Dillard
more infosource: The Writing Life (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 32.
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category: schedule, structure, time
medium: Nonfiction
via: Austin Kleon“I have a bunch of calendars I used before I went digital. Every once in a while, I’ll open up one from 1991 and look at all the names and appointments and things that, at the time, seemed so important. Meetings that I was really worried about, things that I was getting calls four times a day about, and I wonder, ‘Where did it all go? Where are they now?’ It’s so strange, everything has disappeared. The only thing that stays behind is the work.”
Michael Bierut
more infosource: interview in How to Think Like a Graphic Designer, by Debbie Millman (New York: Allworth Press, 2007), 12.
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category: calendar, graphic design, perspective, time, work
medium: Interview
“In one of his poems, George Chapman, Shakespeare’s contemporary, compares time to a pollinating honeybee and the world to a flower garden, declaring strangely that ‘time’s golden thigh upholds the flowery body of the earth.’ He explains that when we use time correctly it brings harmony and legitimacy to life. The verse ends with an aphorism: ‘The use of time is fate.’ The phrase is inscribed on my workroom door. It’s in front of me now, in the flickering sunlight glancing off the river. The Use of Time Is Fate.”
David Esterly
more infosource: The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making (New York: Viking, 2012), 53.
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category: fate, school of life, time
medium: Memoir
“To effect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”
Henry David Thoreau
more infosource: “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” in Walden (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1910), 117.
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medium: Nonfiction
“Nothing can be done without solitude. I’ve created my own solitude which nobody suspects. It’s very difficult nowadays to be alone because we all own watches. Have you even seen a saint with a watch? Yet, I’ve looked everywhere for one even amidst the saints known as patrons of the watchmakers.”
Pablo Picasso
more infosource: Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views, ed. by Dore Ashton (New York: Da Capo Press, 1988), 84.
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category: creative process, introvert, painter, solitude, time
medium: Nonfiction
“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.”
Vita Sackville-West
more infosource: Selections from Twelve Days (1928), in Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings, ed. by Mary Ann Caws (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 125.
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category: creativity, documentation, time, writing
medium: nonfiction
via: this excellent Telegraph article written by Tilda Swinton“Gently, Years, Gently!”
Ralph Hodgson
more infosource: “Flying Scrolls,” in The Skylark: and Other Poems (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1959), 75.
medium: Poetry
“Let’s understand that things are thieves of time because the more things you have, the more time you have to spend working to pay for them, the more your life is chained to a rhythm of perpetual purchase.”
Paul Hawken
more infosource: The 11th Hour, produced and narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio; directed by Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Petersen; distributed by Warner Independent Pictures; and released August 2007.
category: consumerism, economy, materialism, time
medium: Film
“What you newspaper and magazine writers, who work in rabbit time, don’t understand is that the practice of architecture has to be measured in elephant time.”
Eero Saarinen
more infosource: said to a journalist, February 14, 1953, in Eero Saarinen on His Work, Aline Saarinen, ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1962), 9.
category: architecture, journalism, time
medium: Nonfiction
“Life doesn’t hold still. A good snapshot stopped a moment from running away. Photography taught me that to be able to capture transience, by being ready to click the shutter at the crucial moment, was the greatest need I had.”
Eudora Welty
more infosource: One Writer’s Beginnings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 84.
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category: documentation, photography, snapshot, time
medium: Memoir
“My ideal state as a reader when I’m reading other people is feeling I’m vaguely wasting my time when I’m not reading that novel.”
Ian McEwan
more infosource: Interview by Alexandra Alter, The Wall Street Journal, March 25, 2010.
medium: Interview
via: The Writer's Almanac“After school we were on our own, we had our friends, we went out on the cliffs with my dog, and we were free.”
Jane Goodall
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