I am in the middle of writing a big long book this week. And by “big long book” I mean not that very long and by “writing” I mean “just sitting around reading Wikipedia articles and thinking”. I felt myself getting way too caught up in all of the world building so I decided to take some time to re-address this blog and write something.

I want to write a little bit about a few quotes that I like. “Quote” is a very loose word. Some of these can be attributed. Some others cannot. Some of them I think are just things that I just sensed that the writer might have said.

###David Foster Wallace - Kenyon College

There should be an entire section dedicated to this one speech that he gave to Kenyon College. There is something about this speech that I really took to. I was never a fan of his writing, to be honest. I did not like Infinite Jest. I kind of enjoyed the one he wrote about cruises. I did enjoy his “Consider the Lobster”, which was the best article that I have ever read about a food that I cannot eat.

This speech though is something magnificent.

Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

This is just a snippet from a long sequence in where he talks about the things that we worship and how they eat us alive. If you worship money you will never have enough. If you worship your beauty and looks, you will always feel ugly. It is a pretty Buddhist philosophy, to think that the things that we want and try to possess today in the here and now are physical things that can never fully satisfy us. By the very laws of physics and reason, they cannot. The more you want something, the more suffering you eventually will inflict upon yourself.

Here is the other one I really enjoyed.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

One of my friends pointed out this particular quote and I love it too. I think what makes the whole thing work is that last bit: “myriad petty, unsexy ways every day”. To dig deeper, it is the word “unsexy”. The unsexy things that nobody is going to care about. That instant when someone cuts you off on the road or when you get stuck behind someone on the way to work and you lose yourself, thinking horrible negative thoughts. Calming down is unsexy. Being patient with them is unsexy. Keeping yourself stable and sane is unsexy. It amuses me to no end that it is that tiny word that I repeat to myself whenever I feel myself caught up in a bad, every day situation. It helps me break down the whole situation from a detached perspective, and realize that it is not really as big a deal as my lizard brain immediately jumped to.

James Altucher - Unknown Article

You will be in bed at night looking up at the roof and it is going to work out. You don’t know how it is going to happen or in what way. But it is going to work out.

James Altucher writes a blog that has its moments. It sort of started out as a finance-y blog, but then it became a personal development and happiness blog. Most people would recognize the insane headlines.

I have tried to find the exact quote in question for so long with Google and all my resources. I have not been able to and I think it may not actually exist in the form that I remember it. I do not even remember the relevant article. So above you are going to find the reconstruction.

There is something calming in those words, “It is going to work out.” It says nothing about how it is going to happen. It says nothing about how hard you are going to work to make it happen. It says nothing about how happy you are going to be at the end of it. It says nothing about what “work out” means. Those are the words that I tell myself when I am unsure about where I am going in life and what I am doing right now.

Norwegian Wood

Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Only assholes do that.

Norwegian Wood is a personal favorite book of mine. That being said, it is hard to pull out a quote that I liked the most. There is something special about a Murakami book. Not the nostalgia, which I am too young to really imbibe, nor is it about the surreal plots. No, what I like most about a Murakami is the sense of isolation, the feeling of solitude. that sort of mileu. So not really any money quotes that I can throw down for you.

I went through my Kindle edition of Norwegian Wood and found that I have highlighted this little passage. It sounds like the kind of advice that someone more successful than you would give (and it was). There is something in how brusque and clipped it is that just gets me. I appreciate how short and sweet that is. On one hand it is mean. On the other hand, there is something genuinely caring behind the meanness. It wants to get you off your butt and start doing things, maybe not things that take you to where you want to go, but just to be productive.

Bruce Hornsby

The show goes on, as the autumn’s coming And the summer’s all gone Still without you, the show goes on

Yes this is a song. It is featured in a film sequence in the movie Backdraft, which is an R rated movie I saw when I was way too young to be seeing R rated films. The song is pretty stupid and catchy. For some reason it got stuck in my head. For a long … long time.

As I got older, it stopped being that song that plays when we get to see the fire trucks in the film montage but instead a song about how people live. Maybe because it is backed by such a catchy song, but for some reason it gets into my head whenever I think about my place in the world. When you think about it, you can only understand that we are all small, tiny petty people. And no matter how “vital” we think we might be to ourselves and the people whom love us, we are just nothing. Insignificant. And the world continues to exist without us. The sand still sits on the ground. The sun still shines on the sea. It is our job not to feel sad or disappointed by this news, but instead feel ennervated and energized. Feel that life around us is moving and it is challenging us to move with it.

I have written enough. Back to the other writing I am doing …