Category Archives: Quotes

Slow

I have a blog, but I don’t do it properly. Months go by, years even, without me writing. Then suddenly I write a lot. Other people … other people blog properly.

…

The reason I don’t blog every day is because I am slow. … [U]ntil I’ve figured things out, I’m lost. Life for me is leaves blowing backwards. If I try to blog about it, I’m just snatching from the air. I have to wait until I’m clear of the leaves. Then I can look back and see what pattern they’ve been making, and their colours, and the fineness of their outlines.

Other people are not lost at all. The precision of people who can blog all the time. It startles me, that clarity of leaves.

—Jaclyn Moriarty

So Different

When I was growing up, one of my favourite writers was Madeleine L’Engle. And one of the reasons I loved her books was that they were so different.  It seemed as if every bright idea she had, whether it was a contemporary teen novel or a time-travel sci-fi or a historical fiction or a spiritual memoir or whatever, she just wrote it.

—Trudy Morgan-Cole

A Basic Life Skill

This.

I feel strongly that kids should learn how to cook, it’s a basic life skill. I had friends in college who arrived on campus as freshmen not knowing how to boil water to make pasta (or how to do their own laundry). This seems downright dangerous. People should be empowered to take care of themselves, to be self-sufficient. What is more important?

—Tea

Found this via 101 Cookbooks on Twitter… how funny that someone else blogged about 101 Cookbooks & Jamie Oliver in the same post!

ETA: I knew I’d seen her book mentioned somewhere else recently! It was at Chookooloonks!

As Best You Can

We want to say to musicians and parents, ‘Even though your child has chosen a path that you might not have wanted him to or know will be a hard one for them, if they need that in their life, then let them follow their passion and encourage them and support them as best you can.[‘] Devon was really satisfied with his music. It was all about him, his band and their fans.

—Edna Clifford

You Say Party! We Say Die! “Laura Palmer’s Prom“

What stands between us and joy

Perhaps the quotidian is tedious to others only if tedious to oneself, only if it fails to enrich, deepen, and broaden the experience. It is a rare person and a rare book that can make us understand that nothing is tedious in itself no matter how quotidian, and that what stands between us and joy in everyday experience is our own mindless self.

—Maja Djikic

Great Silent Majority

I’ve been reading your blog since last fall. … It seems to me that it’s cathartic for you and maybe even necessary for you to process events in your life. (by the way: hi! hello! I’m Jennifer and I read you avidly but don’t comment much! I prefer the term ‘great silent majority’ to ‘lurker’ though because I don’t think of myself as creepy. You may disagree.) … I hate to see you take the trolls so seriously, especially the toxic ones.

—Jennifer
in comments to “Golden Rule Smashed“

Never Intended

I learned that the subject of one of my posts from last week wasn’t too happy I wrote about her.

I never intended for her to read it.  I neglect this blog so badly that my readership has slipped from 5000 thousand readers a day to maybe 1000.  In the grand scheme, 1000 is nothing.  But one of you 1000 knew who I was talking about felt compelled to send her a note to tell her about that entry, to stir the pot I’d put on the stove.

I took it down.  I probably shouldn’t have written it…

—Kristin Darguzas

Alter the Habits

Some online commentators raised the question of whether the library’s Twitter archive could threaten the privacy of users. [Matt] Raymond [the Library of Congress’s director of communications] said that the archive would be available only for scholarly and research purposes. Besides, he added, the vast majority of Twitter messages that would be archived are publicly published on the Web.

“It’s not as if we’re after anything that’s not out there already,” Mr. Raymond said. “People who sign up for Twitter agree to the terms of service.”

Knowing that the Library of Congress will be preserving Twitter messages for posterity could subtly alter the habits of some users, said Paul Saffo, a visiting scholar at Stanford who specializes in technology’s effect on society.

“After all,” Mr. Saffo said, “your indiscretions will be able to be seen by generations and generations of graduate students.”

—Steve Lohr

Aside: Doesn’t it seem kind of odd that the issue foremost in people’s minds would be privacy (on Twitter?!) rather than copyright? As in, does Twitter have the right to fork over your tweets en masse to the Library of Congress? Seems pretty clear from their TOS that they do (but do keep in mind that the copyright is still yours; what they have is a non-exclusive license to use your tweets); I’m just surprised that more people didn’t ask that question.