[josephruocco]

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

-Isaac Newton

[josephruocco]

God will not have his work made manifest by cowards

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

[josephruocco]

“Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.” — Anne Lamott

[josephruocco]

It’s not that students don’t “get” Kafka’s humor but that we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get—the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It’s hard to put into words, ...You can ask them to imagine his stories as all about a kind of door. To envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens … and it opens outward—we’ve been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch.”

David Foster Wallace, Some Remarks of Kafka's Funniness

[josephruocco]

Werner Herzog

“Taking a close look at - at what's around us there - there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of... overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle - Uh, we in comparison to that enormous articulation - we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban... novel... a cheap novel. We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication... overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the - the stars up here in the - in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment.”

- Werner Herzog

[josephruocco]

"For most blocked creatives, reading is an addiction. We gobble the words of others rather than digest our own thoughts and feelings, rather than cook up something of our own."

- Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way

[josephruocco]

"Showering, swimming, scrubbing, shaving, steering a car—so many s-like-yes words!—all of these are regular, repetitive activities that may tip us over from our logic brain into our more creative artist brain. Solutions to sticky creative problems may bubble up through the dishwater, emerge on the freeway just as we are executing a tricky merge,"

- Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way

[josephruocco]

"SWIM upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction. But be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you you’re headed the wrong way. I guess in all my years, what I heard more often than anything was: a town of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long."

- Sam Walton, Made in America

[josephruocco]

“It’s not just shit, though. It’s wonderful shit. A first draft is an anything-goes space for you to roll up your sleeves and make a terrific mess. It is a place where the writer’s battle plan is redrawn daily; a place where recklessness and risk-taking is rewarded, where half-assed planning and tangential writing can yield unexpectedly amazing results. It is, in short, a place for people like you and me. And when it comes to the topsy-turvy world of the rough draft, the law of the land is best summed up in two words: Exuberant imperfection.”

- Ernest Hemingway

[josephruocco]

My friend must be a Bird—

Because it flies -

Mortal, my friend must be,

Because it dies!

Barbs has it, like a Bee!

Ah, curious friend!

Thou puzzlest me!

- Emily Dickinson

[josephruocco]

"Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters

of life’s longing for itself."

- Khalil Gibran

[josephruocco]

"Against boredom even Gods struggle in vain."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

[josephruocco]

"God will not have his work made manifest by cowards."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

[josephruocco]

"Don't be overwise; fling yourself straight into life, without deliberation; don't be afraid - the flood will bear you to the bank and set you safe on your feet again."

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

[josephruocco]

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life.

There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them."

- Bruce Lee

[josephruocco]

"The useless days will add up to something - These things are your becoming."

- Cheryl Strayed

[josephruocco]

"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity"

- Simone Weil