Time passes slowly at the old folks home in Amsterdam. If you don’t have anything special to do all day long, a molehill can turn into a mountain. A person’s time must be filled with something; one’s attention has to have a focus. Nasty character traits need an outlet. In contrast to what you’d expect, …
Category Archives: Quotes of Note
Pay the writer
A glorious rant from one of the keystone authors of my first couple of decades on this spinning rock, Harlan Ellison. This is a clip from the documentary Dreams with Sharp Teeth, which is itself quite good. (I’d forgotten that I’d linked to this clip before. Forgive me!) I was pleasantly surprised to see that …
Robertson Davies on Useful Knowledge
In one of his early novels, a Robertson Davies character delivers a little speech that impressed me so much at the time that I’ve delightedly trotted it out whenever the subject of information management rears its tedious head.
A student or a scholar
One of the things I discovered about myself during the past year is that I’m a student, not a scholar. I’ve always thought of myself as a “lifelong student,” but I’m not sure I really understood what that meant till recently. In my view, a master’s candidate is a student, a PhD candidate is a …
Safety paranoia
Here’s a quote from Stephen Fry’s novel Making History, one of the few passages that struck me as admirable in that lamentably bad book. If there is a word to describe our age, it must be Security, or to put it another way, Insecurity. From the neurotic insecurity of Freud, by the way of the …
Dahl on travel and civilization
In this excerpt from Roald Dahl’s Boy, his mother asks if he wants to go to Oxford or Cambridge. “No, thank you,” I said. “I want to go straight from school to work for a company that will send me to wonderful faraway places like Africa or China.” You must remember that there was virtually …
Dahl on the life of businessmen and writers
In the following excerpt from Roald Dahl’s Boy, he’s left public school at 18 to take a job with Shell Oil company. He is taking their internal training courses and is learning the business. …[E]very morning, six days a week, Saturdays included, I would dress neatly in a sombre grey suit, have breakfast at seven …
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My future is assured
Vaynerchuk tells anecdotes, but his main activities veer more into the uncool profession of teaching. In the above-linked interview he admits to being a “class clown,” and I have found in my twenty years of teaching that that one characteristic is a better predictor of who ends up a teacher in life than any other. …
Great words
From the final Hold this Thought broadcast: “In East of Eden, John Steinbeck writes: ‘A child may ask, “What is the world’s story about?” And a grown man or woman may wonder, “What way will the world go? How does it end and, while we’re at it, what’s the story about?” I believe that there …
On acting and life
By then, the veterans had developed an informal set of rules for themselves: Take the craft seriously ([Judi] Dench: “deadly”). Don’t take yourself seriously ([Patrick] Stewart: “That’s death to creativity”). Never think you know it all (Dench: “Absolutely fatal”). Ian McKellen: The Player – TIME
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