reminders for the soul
Kurt Vonnegut, talking about when he tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope:
“Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of b
... See moreBut the process of writing — especially writing a first draft — should resemble quickly sketching what’s inside your mind, not squeezing words out of yourself.
The irrationalist • Writing Hack: Write It Just Like That
The idea of research as leisure activity has stayed with me because it seems to describe a kind of intellectual inquiry that comes from idiosyncratic passion and interest. It’s not about the formal credentials. It’s fundamentally about play.
Highlights:
The frontier isn’t volume—it’s discernment. And in that shift, taste has become a survival skill.
Not taste in the superficial sense—not trend-chasing, not aesthetic mimicry, not expensive minimalism for the sake of status. Real taste. The kind that signals coherence. Clarity. The ability to choose what matters in a world drowning in what doesn’t.
Because when abundance is infinite, attention is everything. And what you give your attention to—what you consume, what you engage with, what you amplify—becomes a reflection of how you think.
We associate aesthetic with surface. But good taste is deep structure. It’s the throughline in someone’s life. You can see it in the design of their home, the cadence of their speech, the way they treat people, the books on their shelves.
Underneath all of this is something deeper: taste as a spiritual orientation. Not in the religious sense, but in the felt sense of alignment. Of knowing what your energy wants. Of feeling what’s harmonious and what’s out of tune.
The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.
Stephen King • On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft (A Memoir of the Craft (Reissue))
Our understanding of the world is shaped by a hunger for narrative that rises out of our discomfort with ambiguity and arbitrary events. When surprising things happen, we search for an explanation. The urge to resolve ambiguity can be surprisingly potent, even when the subject is inconsequential.
Henry L. Roediger III • Make It Stick
Only silence enables us to say something unheard of. The compulsion of communication, by contrast, leads to the reproduction of the same, to conformism:
So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop
Byung-Chal Han • Vita Contemplativa
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.
Stephen King • On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft (A Memoir of the Craft (Reissue))
"Write in a way that comes naturally," "Revise and rewrite," "Do not explain too much," and the rest; above all, the cleansing, clarion "Be clear."