Month: July 2012

Prestige: conjuror’s tricks

You might, for example, be interested to know that the word “prestigious” is derived from the Latin praestigiae, which means “conjuror’s tricks.” Isn’t that interesting? This word that we use to mean honorable and esteemed has its beginnings in a word that has everything to do with illusion, deception, and trickery.</

–Cheryl Strayed: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

How Sugar crafts advice

I talk to Mr. Sugar and my friends. I make lists. I attempt to analyze the situation from the perspective of my “best self”—the one that’s generous, reasonable, forgiving, loving, bighearted, and grateful. I think really hard about what I’ll wish I did a year from now. I map out the consequences of the various actions I could take. I ask what my motivations are, what my desires are, what my fears are, what I have to lose, and what I have to gain. I move toward the light, even if it’s a hard direction in which to move. I trust myself. I keep the faith. I mess up sometimes.

–Cheryl Strayed: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Rock and roll is about fathers and sons

Doug Springsteen died in 1998, at seventy-three, after years of illness, including a stroke and heart disease. “I was lucky that modern medicine gave him another ten years of life,” Springsteen said. “T-Bone Burnett said that rock and roll is all about ‘Daaaaddy!’ It’s one embarrassing scream of ‘Daaaaddy!’ It’s just fathers and sons, and you’re out there proving something to somebody in the most intense way possible. It’s, like, ‘Hey, I was worth a little more attention than I got! You blew that one, big guy!’ ”

–David Remnick Bruce Springsteen at 62: The New Yorker

One horrible, tragic act

It was a major challenge to my core beliefs when I found out that the majority of people I was working with inside San Quentin were in for homicide. I resist every single day thinking about them or calling them ‘murderers,’ because I think it reduces them to one horribly tragic act, but one act, and they are much more than that.

–Nancy Mullane Life After Murder: Five Men in Search of Redemption

The future has an ancient heart

There’s a line by the Italian writer Carlo Levi that I think is apt here: “The future has an ancient heart.” I love it because it expresses with such grace and economy what is certainly true—that who we become is born of who we most primitively are; that we both know and cannot possibly know what it is we’ve yet to make manifest in our lives.

–Cheryl Strayed: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Donkey loathing

She takes the opportunity to inform him that she went with him only to gain access to his parents’ donkeys, to which Gonzo responds that the donkeys loathe her, despise her silly hair and stupid upturned nose, and they have asked him, by means of sign language, to convey to her their deepest and most unalterable disdain for her opinions in all matters of consequence.

–Nick Harkaway, The Gone-Away World

Step off the path

Step off the path, and maybe you’d get back and maybe you wouldn’t, but you would be changed. Which sounds like strange and awful until you realise that that’s actually pretty much how it’s always been, and if you think any different, it’s because you’ve never left that little stretch of comfort and gone someplace where what you know gets a bit thin on the ground.

–Nick Harkaway, The Gone-Away World