Quotes

Its eyes were on long horns like snail’s eyes, and it could move them in and out like telescopes. It had ears like a bat’s ears, and its tubby body was shaped like a spider’s and covered with thick soft fur — and it had hands and feet like a monkey’s. It told the children […] that it was a Psammead or sand-fairy. (Psammead is pronounced Sammy-ad.) It was old, old, old, and its birthday was almost at the beginning of everything. And it had been buried in the sand for thousands of years. But it still kept its fairylikeness, and part of this fairylikeness was its power to give people whatever they wished for.

- E. Nesbit, The Story of the Amulet

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I know this is probably a tall order, but I need you to do me a favor… and try not to be so perfect, all right? I’d hate to see you miss out on something, because you had a picture in your mind, or you thought you could change something you can’t… I’d hate to see you not find what you really want.

Oh, but [my darling], it’s your [life]; it’s your decision.

- Diane Keaton, The Family Stone

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The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.

- Chuck Palahniuk

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In (mis)recognizing the self in the mirror, we create an alienated self – a self which is forever marked by a lack, and forever trying to attain what it saw in the mirror.

- Lacanian Theory

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[Is] ‘fat’ really the worst thing a human being can be? Is ‘fat’ worse than ‘vindictive’, ‘jealous’, ’shallow’, ‘vain’, ‘boring’ or ‘cruel’? Not to me; but then, you might retort, what do I know about the pressure to be skinny? I’m not in the business of being judged on my looks, what with being a writer and earning my living by using my brain…

I went to the British Book Awards that evening. After the award ceremony I bumped into a woman I hadn’t seen for nearly three years. The first thing she said to me? ‘You’ve lost a lot of weight since the last time I saw you!’

‘Well,’ I said, slightly non-plussed, ‘the last time you saw me I’d just had a baby.’

What I felt like saying was, ‘I’ve produced my third child and my sixth novel since I last saw you. Aren’t either of those things more important, more interesting, than my size?’ But no – my waist looked smaller! Forget the kid and the book: finally, something to celebrate!

So the issue of size and women was (ha, ha) weighing on my mind as I flew home to Edinburgh the next day. Once up in the air, I opened a newspaper and my eyes fell, immediately, on an article about the pop star Pink.

Her latest single, ‘Stupid Girls’, is the antidote-anthem for everything I had been thinking about women and thinness. ‘Stupid Girls’ satirises the talking toothpicks held up to girls as role models: those celebrities whose greatest achievement is un-chipped nail polish, whose only aspiration seems to be getting photographed in a different outfit nine times a day, whose only function in the world appears to be supporting the trade in overpriced handbags and rat-sized dogs.

Maybe this all seems funny, or trivial, but it’s really not. It’s about what girls want to be, what they’re told they should be, and how they feel about who they are. I’ve got two daughters who will have to make their way in this skinny-obsessed world, and it worries me, because I don’t want them to be empty-headed, self-obsessed, emaciated clones; I’d rather they were independent, interesting, idealistic, kind, opinionated, original, funny – a thousand things, before ‘thin’. And frankly, I’d rather they didn’t give a gust of stinking chihuahua flatulence whether the woman standing next to them has fleshier knees than they do. Let my girls be Hermiones, rather than Pansy Parkinsons. Let them never be Stupid Girls. Rant over.

- J.K. Rowling

*

There is no such thing as ‘a kids game’ and ‘playing in a sandbox.’ EVERYTHING COUNTS. Coulda, woulda, shoulda–shove’em up the Tooth Fairys ass. Everyone “can do better,” but very few do. Potential is nothing; actual is everything.

I am not saying that you can’t do it. But until you DO it, everything else is bullshit. Stop talking about it, stop ‘playing,’ stop waiting for whatever it is you are waiting for. If you can climb this mountain and sit on top with [those] who matter, then get up here. There is always more room for talent than there are talented to occupy it.

But sadly, lots of people never reach this level of understanding. They just react against a successful person because they see another’s success as a reflection of their own failure, and instead of turning that frustration inwards and improving themselves, they hate on the winners. After all, that is much easier than actually trying to become a winner themself.

This is such a perfect explanation of something that so many people, especially critics, fall victim to: The “coulda, woulda, shoulda” phenomenon. You know people always talk about the things they want to do but never do them? Some people are lazy, some stupid, but the reality is that most are scared. If you don’t try something, then you can always sit on the sidelines and talk about what you would have done; but once you cast your hat in the ring, you can’t play that game anymore. You shed the ability to talk about what you might do; now, the discussion shifts to what you DID do, and you risk failure. One can always concoct a victory or explain away a failure in the abstract, but once you put yourself out there, once you actually set something at risk, then you open yourself up to the potential of real failure, and you can’t talk or wish a real failure away.

Some people can’t handle this. They’d rather talk about what they could have won rather than risk losing to actually win it. Personally, I don’t get that attitude. I’d rather try my best and fail, then risk nothing, but gain nothing. At least that way I can go to bed knowing where I stand.

Everything counts. This is your life, you only have about 80 years if you are lucky, and everything you do counts. Even practice counts. Why? Because you are practicing for something that does matter: A game.

[This is not to say that you have to be serious all the time. Of course not; practice can and should be fun and entertaining. And fucking off can sometimes be practice for other things. Video games can teach critical thinking skills, sports can teach strategy and cooperation, etc, etc. It's not that you have to always be doing something specifically designed for a future use, its more that you should always be doing something that adds to your life. Even when I relax, I am adding to my life by recharging myself for when I am doing something that requires energy.]

The essential point: IT ALL MATTERS, whether you realize it or not.

- Tucker Max

*

“Have you ever had that feeling — that you’d like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?”
“Sure,” said May Kasahara. “I feel that way all the time.”
“[. . .] I wanted to get outside myself: the me that had existed until then. And it was the same for Kumiko. In that new world of ours, we were trying to get hold of new selves that were better suited to who we were deep down. We believed we could live in a way that was more perfectly suited to who we were.”

“Does this make any sense to you?” I asked.
“Sure it does.”
“What do you think about it?”

“[. . .] from what you just told me, I think you kinda had the wrong idea from the very beginning. You know what I mean, Mr. Wind-Up Bird? What you were just talking about… I don’t know, it’s kind of impossible for anybody to do that stuff, like, ‘OK, now I’m gonna make a whole new world’ or ‘OK, now I’m gonna make a whole new self.’ That’s what I think. You might think you made a whole new world or a new self, but your old self is always gonna be there, just below the surface, and if something happens, it’ll stick its head out and say ‘Hi.’ You don’t seem to realize that. You were made somewhere else. And even this idea you have of remaking yourself: even that was made somewhere else. [. . .] How come you don’t get it? That’s a big problem if you ask me. And that’s what you’re being punished for — by all kinds of things: by the world you tried to get rid of, or by the self you tried to get rid of. Do you see what I’m saying?”

May Kasahara was probably right. This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me.

Even I know that much, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. How come you don’t get it?

- Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle