“ “The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms.” ”
—Bruno Latour, French sociologist of science, anthropologist and an influential theorist in the field of Science and Technology Studies, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 245. (via amiquote)
May 2012
32 posts
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
—Ira Glass (via rosemarygeorge)
“You get work however you get work, but people keep working because they are easy to get along with and because they deliver the work on time. And you don’t even need all three! Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. People will forgive the lateness of your work if it is good and they like you. And you don’t have to be as good as everyone else if you’re on time and it’s always a pleasure to hear from you.”
—Neil Gaiman (via austinkleon)
“When people realize they’re being listened to, they tell you things.”
—Richard Ford, whose dyslexia forces him to listen more closely when people are talking (via austinkleon)
“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
—
-Stephen King.
Ummmmm, errrrrrrrr, wow.
(via walkwhilereading)
“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (via washingtonpoststyle)
“
My aunt is a social worker in Leicester. A couple of years ago she was visiting a family with a five year old child. When she went into the living room to meet the mother she found the mother breastfeeding her five year old son.
My aunt was a little shocked, and suggested to the mother than the boy was too old to be breast fed. The boy looked witheringly at my aunt and said “Fuck off”.
” —Comment from Scipio16 about the Time magazine attachment parenting issue - The Guardian .
“I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.”
—Barack Obama in an interview with ABC News (via nprfreshair)
