What did you learn today? What’s most fine about that question is that it assumes that this was a day unlike the one before, a novel day, a day of signal. By asking it you imply that there was something going on today besides rote and ritual. By asking it every single day at dinner you create a formal system, a policy, and yet in response to this very predictable question you can expect news, novelty, fresh information, mysteries, secrets exposed.
— Mostly Summer Rolls by Paul Ford
Then I came here and started writing this. I’d just composed another piece the other day, so Medium was on my mind. In fact, the whole experience I’ve just described is part of the argument for a site like Medium. That argument goes: No writer should be in the business of making a personal website. They’re hard to find, readers rarely return to them, and besides—let me just contribute this last part myself—they aren’t even fun to make anymore.
I wonder if maybe I’ve made my last website. I don’t know.
The end of history and the last website by Robin Sloan
Some play it smart…. I had a ball.
Some of us fly, all of us fall.
“I looked at it,” he tells me, “and I couldn’t tell what it was about.”For now, Merle Haggard is still flying. Sure, it gets harder to stay aloft. And sure, he can see the ground below, a little clearer and closer each year, patiently waiting for him. But long may it have to wait. Long may we hear the cantankerous flapping of his wings, and the whisper of truth he gives to the wind. And long may it be before even Merle Haggard has to fall in final, glorious protest.
–Chris Heath, Merle Haggard Interview: the Last Outlaw
GQ Magazine, 2005
But compassion isn’t about solutions. It’s about giving all the love that you’ve got.
–Cheryl Strayed: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don’t know what it is yet.
Your assumptions about the lives of others are in direct relation to your naïve pomposity.
–Cheryl Strayed: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
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
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
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
Bewildered Creatures 