
“Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.”
Don DeLillo
more infosource: Conversations with Don DeLillo (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), p.143.
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category: freedom, identity, individuality, survival, writing
medium: letter
notes: This comes from a letter Don DeLillo wrote to Jonathan Franzen
“Pink is the navy blue of India.”
Diana Vreeland
more infosource: D. V. (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1997), paperback edition, 106.
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category: blue, color, fashion, India, pink
medium: autobiography
“It amazes me that most people spend more time planning next summer’s vacation than they do planning the rest of their lives.”
Patricia Fripp
more infosource: Get What You Want! (Executive Books, 1998).
category: future, goal, life, planning, summer, vacation
medium: self-help
“I don’t consider myself a hero. I’m an ordinary girl who believed in her dream. You don’t have to be someone special or anything special to achieve something amazing. You’ve just got to have a dream, believe in it, and work hard.”
Jessica Watson
more infosource: CNN, May 15, 2010
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category: adolescence, Australia, hero, modesty, sailing, sea, teenager
medium: television news
“If you want to make the right decision for the future, fear is not a very good consultant.”
Markus Dohle
more infosource: “Publish or Perish,” by Ken Auletta, in The New Yorker, April 26, 2010.
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category: consultant, decision, fear, future
medium: magazine article
“Schopenhauer: the task of philosophy is to turn tears into knowledge. And for me, a sigh into a tweet.”
Alain de Botton
more infosource: Twitter, 11:57 AM Apr 14, 2010 via web
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category: knowledge, philosophy, Schopenhauer, tears, tweet, Twitter pearls
medium: social media
“When it finally briefly happens, happiness can feel very worrying.”
Alain de Botton
more infosource: Twitter, 11:59 PM Apr 14, 2010 via mobile web
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category: happiness, Twitter pearls, worry
medium: social media
“Most great problems have no solutions, beyond the relief to be had in sharing and analysing them.”
Alain de Botton
more infosource: Twitter, 12:27 AM Apr 15, 2010 via mobile web
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category: solution, Twitter pearls, unsolvable problem
medium: social media
“What grief we’d avoid if we knew how to transfer emotional experience across generations, as we do money or scientific knowledge.”
Alain de Botton
more infosource: Twitter, 2:09 AM Apr 9, 2010 mobile web
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category: emotion, grief, Twitter pearls
medium: social media
“It takes a particular lack of imagination to feel no discomfort in the presence of a cleaner.”
Alain de Botton
more infosource: Twitter, 11:03 AM Apr 9, 2010 via web
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category: cleaning, imagination, Twitter pearls
medium: social media
“There are meetings which, when cancelled at the last minute, give one an ecstatic feeling of having cheated death for a little longer.”
Alain de Botton
more infosource: Twitter, 8:08 AM Apr 21, 2010 via web
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category: death, meeting, Twitter pearls
medium: social media
“I have been in a slow process of selling and giving away everything I own…It started a couple of years ago. It was in response to going to these Golden Globe type events and they just give you stuff. You don’t want it. You don’t use it. And then Mad Men started to become a success on a popular level and people started sending me stuff, just boxes of shit. Gifts for every holiday, clothes. One day, I looked around and thought ‘I don’t want this stuff, I didn’t ask for it.’ So I started giving it to friends or charity stores, or if it is still in its box I might sell it for a hundred bucks. I liked it so I didn’t stop.”
Vincent Kartheiser
more infosource: “The Observer,” by Tim Adams, in The Guardian, Sunday, April 25, 2010.
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category: awards, consumerism, Golden Globes, Mad Men, materialism, paring down, stuff
medium: newspaper profile
notes: Vincent Kartheiser plays Pete Campbell in the television series Mad Men
“Every child understands a promise—if it is kept—and looks forward to the next promise.”
John Irving
more infosource: The Cider House Rules (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1985), 26.
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category: child, consistency, honesty, parenting, promise
medium: fiction
“I cried for the boyfriends I was no longer with, the people and places I no longer knew very well, for my parents and grandparents ailing and stuck in Florida, their tough, unchanging forms conjured only in memory: a jewel box kept in a medicine cabinet in the attic of a house on the moon; that’s where their unchanging forms were kept. I cried for everyone and for all the scrabbly, funny love one sent out into the world like some hit song that enters space and bounds off to another galaxy, a tune so pretty you think the words are true, you do! There was never any containing a song like that, keeping it. It went off and out, speeding out of earshot or imagining or any reach at all, like a rocket invented in sleep.”
Lorrie Moore
more infosource: Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 143.
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category: beautiful description, crying, distance, loss, love, music, rocket, song
medium: fiction
“I put my faith in therapy as others do in religion, or philosophy.”
Anaïs Nin
more infosource: The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol 7, 1966–1974) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 175.
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category: faith, psychology, religion, therapy
medium: letter
notes: Nin wrote these words in a letter to a reader in winter 1970–1971


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