Brian Sholis
@briansholis
Brian Sholis
language and
- “Perhaps our biggest time error is near bias—caring too much about what’s about to happen, and too little about the future.”
The New Yorker • Being in Time
- “… we never know as much about our own desires as we think we do. One of the great gifts and challenges of desire is that it illuminates who we are in unexpected ways.”
Garth Greenwell • Just a moment...
* "The self-honesty required here isn’t a one-time thing, it’s an ongoing process.* You may find that doing the things you once did is no longer congruent with your inner climate. This gives you, roughly, two choices—either you flow with who you’ve actually become, or you slowly descend into a hollow parody of what you once were."
Sasha Chapin • If You Have Writer's Block, Maybe You Should Stop Lying If You Have Writer's Block, Maybe You Should Stop Lying
* “The 10 Club is a group of 10 people you want to work with later in life, and every member should be kind, ambitious, and generous.”
David Perell • The Fruits of Friendship - David Perell
2019 profile of Wendell Berry by Amanda Petrusich.
Archive-friendly link: https://archive.is/wMaf1
WB: “The thing that worries me very much is how much language we’re using now that is so abstract as to require no thought at all. I mean very important words. Justice, for instance. I had a list, I think, of eleven kinds of justice. Restorative justice, climate justice, economic justice, social justice, and so on. The historian John Lukacs, whose work I greatly respect, said that “the indiscriminate pursuit of justice . . . may lay the world to waste.” And he invoked modern war, which kills indiscriminately for the sake of some “justice.” He thought the pursuit of truth, small “t,” much safer. I want to remember—and this comes to me from my dad, to some extent—that our system of justice requires a finding of truth, and it labors to see that justice is never done by one person.”
WB: “Once you accept that something or somebody is exploitable, there’s another limitlessness. Exploitation leads, with perfect logic, to exhaustion. And our ways of land use exploit both land and people.”
WB: “You must either decide this is worth working at, or just leave it undone. Marriage is not perfect agreement. But you’ve accepted this other person into your mind. I work alone, but always with her presence in my mind. And she is somebody I want to impress. I’m going to write this with the hope that it’ll help her to love me. I feel the stakes are pretty high. I’m in a conversation with her that hasn’t ended yet.”
WB; “Our dominant practice now is to solve problems with other problems.”
WB: “You can’t think about the issues we’re talking about without finally having to talk about mystery. You’ll finally have to talk about the commitment that doesn’t see any end. That’s a life that you are not going to be able to prescribe, that finally you’re not in charge of.”
- "What could be more worthy, and rewarding, I think, than to give over the second half of life to the recovery of the first?"
Lapham's Quarterly • Strange Days | Sven Birkerts
- “In a just world, a college like Swarthmore simply wouldn’t exist. The mere possibility would be regarded as obscene.”