reminders for the soul
"I was waiting for something extraordinary to happen, but as the years wasted on, nothing ever did unless I caused it.”
—Charles Bukowski
Flaubert famously said, “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
"E. L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This i... See more
Anne Lamott • Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
in trying to figure out the brain, the obstacle is that we have no finer instrument than the brain itself for the purpose. The greatest hindrance to objective knowledge is our own subjective presence
Alan Watts • Tao: The Watercourse Way
"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."
William Strunk JR. and E.B. White • The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition
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.
Zen can essentially be reduced to three things.
Everything changes;
everything is interconnected;
pay attention to it.
Good writing is specific and concrete.
William Zinsser • Writing to Learn
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