self « Quotenik

source: letter to a student dated December 10, 1951, in Letters of E. B. White, rev. edition edited by Martha White (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 316.

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category: opus, self, translation, writing

medium: Letter

via: Carmela Ciuraru

“Perhaps what’s most remarkable about the nom de plume, and rarely talked about, is its power to unlock creativity—and its capacity to withhold it. Even when its initial adoption is utilitarian, a pen name can assume a life of its own. Many writers have been surprised by the intimate and even disorienting relationships they have formed with their alter egos.”

Carmela Ciuraru

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source: “The Rise and Fall of Pseudonyms,” The New York Times, June 24, 2011.

category: ego, identity, nom de plume, pseudonym, self

medium: Newspaper essay

“Most people don’t form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling.”

David Brooks

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source: “It’s Not About You,” The New York Times, May 30, 2011.

category: identity, self

medium: Op-Ed

“I’m very interested in someone’s path to knowledge being a kind of madness. I’m interested in the route that people must take to arrive at a spot where they can be large and whole and responsive.”

Scott Spencer

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source: “Scott Spencer,” interviewed by Lorrie Moore, BOMB magazine, issue 67, Spring 1999.

category: knowledge, madness, mind, self

medium: Interview

“I don’t think that an artist should bother about his audience. His best audience is the person he sees in his shaving mirror every morning. I think that the audience an artist imagines, when he imagines that kind of a thing, is a room filled with people wearing his own mask.”

Vladimir Nabokov

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source: July 1962 interview with Peter Duval-Smith and Christopher Burstall, in Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1973), 18.

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category: audience, self, writing

medium: Interview

“When she went into ‘Willow, Weep for Me,’ you wept. You looked about and saw that the few other customers were also crying in their beer and shot glasses. Nor were they that drunk. Something was still there, that something that distinguishes an artist from a performer: the revealing of self. Here I be. Not for long, but here I be. In sensing her mortality, we sensed our own.”

Studs Terkel

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source: describing Billie Holiday, in Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 226.

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category: Billie Holiday, mortality, music, performer, self, singer

medium: Memoir

via: The Writer's Almanac

“Bosom not as copious as she would wish, but has noticed that Botticelli bosoms are not big either. Legs OK, according to husband. Freckles.”

Julia Child

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source: Describing herself in a February 23, 1953 letter to Avis DeVoto in As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), 78.

category: body, book review, breasts, freckles, legs, self

medium: letter

notes: Quoted in Dwight Garner's review of the book in the New York Times, "Friends Who Didn’t Mince Words," December 9, 2010.

“A decade ago, if you saw someone covering their ear and talking to themselves, you would have thought they were just nuts. Today that’s the norm. It’s as if they are totally consumed by their own world and have no room for the outside. It is complete immersion in self to the exclusion of all else. That has to have an impact on the rest of our lives.”

Charles Mysak

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source: “In Bookstore’s End, No Joy for Sidewalk Seller,” by Jennifer Medina, The New York Times, September 14, 2010.

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category: cell phone, self, technology

medium: newspaper article

“The way you get to know yourself is by the expressions on other people’s faces, because that’s the only thing that you can see, unless you carry a mirror about.”

Gil Scott-Heron

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source: “New York is Killing Me,” by Alex Wilkinson, The New Yorker, August 9, 2010, 26–32.

category: expression, identity, mirror, musician, self

medium: magazine profile

“Birthday resolution: From now on specialize; never again make any concession to the ninety-nine parts of you which are like everybody else at the expense of the one which is unique.”