“I love how you can snap a pea’s stem and pull the string and how it leaves a perfect seam that opens easily under your thumbnail. And then you find those sweet, starchy peas in their own canoe of crisp, watery, and almost sugary pod.”
Gabrielle Hamilton
more infosource: Blood, Bones & Butter (New York: Random House, 2011), 14.
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category: food, pea, satisfaction, vegetable
medium: Memoir
“It’s only now and then, maybe once every three or four days, that I manage to write a sentence in which I hear that wonderful harmonic chime that you get when, say, you flick the edge of a wine glass with a fingernail. That’s what keeps me going.”
John Banville
more infosource: “The Art of Fiction No. 200,” interviewed by Belinda McKeon, in Issue 188 of The Paris Review, 2009.
category: creative process, fiction, satisfaction, sentence, writing
medium: interview
notes: view transcript here
“We attended the school with more or less regularity once or twice a week, in summer, walking to it in the cool of the mornings by the forest paths, and back in the gloaming at the end of the day. All the pupils brought their dinners in baskets—corn dodger, buttermilk and other good things—and sat in the shade of the trees at noon and ate them. It is the part of my education which I look back upon with the most satisfaction.”
Mark Twain
more infosource: Autobiography of Mark Twain, edited by Harriet Elinor Smith, vol 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 216.
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category: education, food, satisfaction, school
medium: autobiography
“I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.'”
Kurt Vonnegut
more infosource: A Man Without a Country (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 132.
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category: appreciation, happiness, satisfaction
medium: nonfiction
“Blessed is the man who has found his work, blessed is the man to whom his work appeals with so much interest that he goes from it with a longing to be able to finish what he has been at, and comes back to it with a prospect that now he shall be able to accomplish what time and perhaps fatigue would not allow him to proceed with the day before.”
James Joseph Walsh
more infosource: The Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries (New York: Catholic Summer School Press, 1907), 125.
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category: blessed, happiness, job, satisfaction, work
medium: nonfiction
notes: Thomas Carlyle wrote "Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness." And Elbert Hubbard wrote "Blessed is that man who has found his work."
“Doing beautiful things is its own reward. If you do something that you’re proud of, that someone else understands, that is a thing of beauty that wasn’t there before—you can’t beat that.”
Raymond Joseph Teller
more infosource: “Penn and Teller Interview,” Telegraph, by Benjamin Secher, July 9, 2010.
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category: beauty, creativity, reward, satisfaction, work
medium: interview
notes: Silent half of the magic team Penn + Teller. He changed his legal name to Teller.
via: boingboing“When does a job feel meaningful? Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others.”
Alain de Botton
more infosource: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (New York: Pantheon, 2009), 78.
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category: delight, job, meaning, profession, satisfaction, suffering, work
medium: nonfiction
satisfaction