Rob Tourtelot
- if I tell exactly the story I’ve set out to tell, I’ve failed. The truer story exists somewhere outside the margins of consciousness. Writing constraints help us discover the truth rather than recite it.
from The One (and Only) Technique That Finally Helped Me Write About Trauma
😨 Conquering Chronic Anxiety with Nick Wignall // Weds 17th Apr 2024
Oftentimes I will load a portion of a story with superfluous information simply to hide the one important bit of information that I need the audience to know but not yet recognize as important. I clutter the landscape so that the audience can’t tell what is important and what is not.
from Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling by Dan Kennedy
- “The main thing is this—when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.... Say anything, but be respectful. Say—maybe say, Heart, little heart, beat softly but never forget your job, the blood. You can whisper also, Remember, remember." ~ Grace Paley’s "My Father Addresses Me on the Facts o... See more
from "The main thing is this—when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning" ~Grace Paley
Morning Pages is another tactic for getting out of your own way like this – a ritual, in a deep sense of that word, because what's key is the observance, not harnessing that observance for some particular outcome. Everyone should have one or two such rituals, if you ask me, to help unclench one's agitated grip on the world and to encounter reality
... See morefrom Three pages a day by Oliver Burkeman
- GEORGE SAUNDERS: I think ultimately it would be, are you benefiting the people in proximity to you? And truly benefiting them. And that in itself is, how would you know?
EZRA KLEIN: Yeah, how would you know is, I think, often a harder problem that we give it credit for. Why in proximity?
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Well, I think that’s the place to start. And s... See morefrom Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews George Saunders (Published 2021)
Early in the journey you wonder how long the journey will take and whether you will make it in this lifetime. Later you will see that where you are going is HERE and you will arrive NOW...so you stop asking.
from Be Here Now by Ram Dass
- Thus our strange relationship with the pain of grief. In the early days, we wish only for it to end; later on, we fear that it will. And when it finally does begin to ease, it also does not, because, at first, feeling better can feel like loss, too.
from Losing Love, Finding Love, and Living with the Fragility of It All by Maria Popova