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Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.
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John Waters
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If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
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Ray Bradbury
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Always be reading. Go to the library. There’s magic in being surrounded by books. Get lost in the stacks. Read bibliographies. It’s not the book you start with, it’s the book that book leads you to. Collect books, even if you don’t plan on reading them right away. Filmmaker John Waters has said, “Nothing is more important than an unread library.” Don’t worry about doing research. Just search.
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Austin Kleon (Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative)
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Collect books, even if you don’t plan on reading them right away. Filmmaker John Waters has said, “Nothing is more important than an unread library.
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Austin Kleon (Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative)
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Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time.
Nightclubs are great literary research centers. So is Ibiza!
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Roman Payne (Cities & Countries)
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This imaginary gift is a journey for your imagination.
I send you...
A luxury train ride. On this train are all the inspiring people you've ever wanted to meet or talk to. You glide from car to car, sitting or lying down on velvet lounge chairs, listening and asking questions. There is also a voluminous library on the train, with every book you've ever wanted to read or look at. Kind people bring you delicious tidbits to eat and nourishing liquids to drink. If you take a nap, time stands still until you return so you never miss anything. You receive a large journal filled with photographs, drawings and descriptions of your journey to take with you when you leave. You realize that you can board this train at any time.
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SARK
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Always be reading. Go to the library. There's magic in being surrounded by books. Get lost in the stacks. Read bibiliographies. It's not the book you start with, it's the book that book leads you to.
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Austin Kleon (Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative)
“
How are you coming with your home library? Do you need some good ammunition on why it's so important to read? The last time I checked the statistics...I think they indicated that only four percent of the adults in this country have bought a book within the past year. That's dangerous. It's extremely important that we keep ourselves in the top five or six percent.
In one of the Monthly Letters from the Royal Bank of Canada it was pointed out that reading good books is not something to be indulged in as a luxury. It is a necessity for anyone who intends to give his life and work a touch of quality. The most real wealth is not what we put into our piggy banks but what we develop in our heads. Books instruct us without anger, threats and harsh discipline. They do not sneer at our ignorance or grumble at our mistakes. They ask only that we spend some time in the company of greatness so that we may absorb some of its attributes.
You do not read a book for the book's sake, but for your own.
You may read because in your high-pressure life, studded with problems and emergencies, you need periods of relief and yet recognize that peace of mind does not mean numbness of mind.
You may read because you never had an opportunity to go to college, and books give you a chance to get something you missed. You may read because your job is routine, and books give you a feeling of depth in life.
You may read because you did go to college.
You may read because you see social, economic and philosophical problems which need solution, and you believe that the best thinking of all past ages may be useful in your age, too.
You may read because you are tired of the shallowness of contemporary life, bored by the current conversational commonplaces, and wearied of shop talk and gossip about people.
Whatever your dominant personal reason, you will find that reading gives knowledge, creative power, satisfaction and relaxation. It cultivates your mind by calling its faculties into exercise.
Books are a source of pleasure - the purest and the most lasting. They enhance your sensation of the interestingness of life. Reading them is not a violent pleasure like the gross enjoyment of an uncultivated mind, but a subtle delight.
Reading dispels prejudices which hem our minds within narrow spaces. One of the things that will surprise you as you read good books from all over the world and from all times of man is that human nature is much the same today as it has been ever since writing began to tell us about it.
Some people act as if it were demeaning to their manhood to wish to be well-read but you can no more be a healthy person mentally without reading substantial books than you can be a vigorous person physically without eating solid food. Books should be chosen, not for their freedom from evil, but for their possession of good. Dr. Johnson said: "Whilst you stand deliberating which book your son shall read first, another boy has read both.
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Earl Nightingale
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But I believe that good questions are more important than answers, and the best children’s books ask questions, and make the reader ask questions. And every new question is going to disturb someone’s universe.
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Madeleine L'Engle (Dare to be creative!: A lecture presented at the Library of Congress, November 16, 1983)
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Libraries are more than just a storage place for books, they are treasure troves filled with creativity and knowledge. And that knowledge can be empowering.
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R.L. Hemlock
“
I use a library the same way I’ve been describing the creative process as a writer — I don’t go in with lists of things to read, I go in blindly and reach up on shelves and take down books and open them and fall in love immediately. And if I don’t fall in love that quickly, shut the book, back on the shelf, find another book, and fall in love with it. You can only go with loves in this life.
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Ray Bradbury
“
you never will love art well, till you love what she mirrors better
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John Ruskin (The Eagle's Nest (Barnes & Noble Digital Library): Ten Lectures on the Relation of Natural Science to Art)
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[W]hen I put Jorge in the library I did not yet know he was the murderer. He acted on his own, so to speak. And it must not be thought that this is an 'idealistic' position, as if I were saying that the characters have an autonomous life and the author, in a kind of trance, makes them behave as they themselves direct him. That kind of nonsense belongs in term papers. The fact is that the characters are obliged to act according to the laws of the world in which they live. In other words, the narrator is the prisoner of his own premises.
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Umberto Eco (Postscript to the Name of the Rose)
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What Now? Talk a walk Start your swipe file Go to the library Buy a notebook and use it Get yourself a calendar Start your logbook Give a copy of this book away Start a blog Take a nap
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Austin Kleon (Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative)
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People work harder, longer, and more creatively if they are motivated by the intrinsic pleasure of their work. Managers must do everything they can to make the value of jobs obvious and the joy in them accessible.
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Robert Watson (Leadership Secrets of the Salvation Army: Library Edition)
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There’s a simple reason for this. The more shots you get at the target, the more likely you’ll eventually score a bull’s-eye, but the more misses you’ll accrue as well. The bull’s-eyes end up in museums and on library shelves, not the misses. Which, when you think about it, is a shame. It feeds the myth that geniuses get it right the first time, that they don’t make mistakes, when, in fact, they make more mistakes than the rest of us. What
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Eric Weiner (The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley (Creative Lessons in History))
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The writer whose words are going to be read by children has a heavy responsibility. And yet, despite the undeniable fact that the children’s minds are tender, they are also far more tough than many people realize, and they have an openness and an ability to grapple with difficult concepts which many adults have lost. Writers of children’s literature are set apart by their willingness to confront difficult questions.
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Madeleine L'Engle (Dare to be creative!: A lecture presented at the Library of Congress, November 16, 1983)
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The bull’s-eyes end up in museums and on library shelves, not the misses. Which, when you think about it, is a shame. It feeds the myth that geniuses get it right the first time, that they don’t make mistakes, when, in fact, they make more mistakes than the rest of us.
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Eric Weiner (The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley)
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Always be reading. Go to the library. There’s magic in being surrounded by books.
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Austin Kleon (Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative)
“
Filmmaker John Waters has said, “Nothing is more important than an unread library.
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Austin Kleon (Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative)
“
Nothing is more important than an unread library.” Don’t worry about doing research. Just search.
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Austin Kleon (Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative)
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To fully encapsulate my creativity, I read to inhale, write to exhale. The whole process helps me breathe story.
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Ace Antonio Hall (Lord of the Flies: Fitness for Writers)
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The intimate yet tense interrelationship among these three forces -- humans, earth, and fire -- makes my soul tremble. I don't believe creative impulse can exist without the trembling of the soul.
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Park Wan-Suh (Lonesome You (Library of Korean Literature, #9))
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The non-jocks, the readers, the gay kids, the ones starting to stew about social injustice: for these kids, "letting your freak flag fly" is both self discovery and self defense. You cry for this bunch at the mandatory pep assemblies. Huddled together, miserably, in the upper reaches of the bleachers, wearing their oversized raincoats and their secondhand Salvation Army clothes, they stare down at the school-sanctioned celebration of the A list students. They know bullying, these kids--especially the ones who frefuse to exist under the radar. They're tripped in the hallway, shoved against lockers, pelted with Skittles in the lunchroom. For the most part, their tormentors are stealth artists.
The freaks know where there's refuge: I the library, the theater program, art class, creative writing.
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Wally Lamb (The Hour I First Believed)
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The new obstacle is figuring out which dream to pursue and then cultivating and applying the necessary energy to engage in that pursuit. The internet provides access to all the world’s libraries, but it also provides access to World of Warcraft—limitless knowledge but also limitless distraction.
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Chase Jarvis (Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life)
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She had so many things to be grateful for: two eyes to see the splendors of this wonderful world, two legs to explore it all, food on her table each night at a time when billions have empty bellies. And a roof over her head for ample shelter. She had wise books to read in her library, work that fed her creativity and, as the billionaire said so often, an opportunity to achieve outright mastery not only to benefit herself but also in service of society. And
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Robin S. Sharma (The 5AM Club: Own Your Morning. Elevate Your Life.)
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If we could see souls instead of bodies, what would be beautiful?
What is the first thing people would know about you? What would you be
most afraid of them seeing? Who would you impress? Who would you
love?
What would you adjust as you walked past the mirror? What kind of work
would you be in? What would your goals be, how would you strive to be
better if what you collected in the bank or put on your body or attached next
to your name on a business card no longer affected what people saw?
Would you spend your time in gyms and stores or in libraries and
temples? Who would you let yourself fall in love with? What would your
“type” be? Tall, dark, and handsome or creative, kind, and self-aware?
What would happen if we could see people not as “bad,” but as…
blocked? If we could see the ways they’ve packed away their pain, or how
they hold a belief that keeps them away from being kind to others?
What would happen if we realized our bodies never wanted anything more
than to feel connected, and acted out on nothing more than their false ideas
of being separate, different, exiled, the odd one out, the almost-but-notgood-enough?
What would happen if we embraced our desire to play out and finagle
with our individualism, but eventually returned to the knowing that we are
all just energy fields? And where would we be if we realized that we were
all from the same one? What would happen if we realized we really weren’t
that different at all?
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Brianna Wiest (101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think)
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Loving him was all interpretation, creative in its way. We barely used language at all to communicate: he sulked and thought I was putting him down if I made complicated remarks, and sometimes I felt numb at the compromise and self-suppression I submitted to. Yet beyond that it was all guesswork; we were thinking for two. The darkened air of the flat was full of the hints we made. The stupidity and the resentment were dreadful at times. But then in sex he lost his awkwardness. He shows his capacity to change as I rambled over him now with my fingertips and watched him glow and gulp with desire; his clothes seemed to shrivel off him and he lay there making his naked claim for the only certainty in his life. It wasn't something learnt, I suspected, from the guys before me who'd picked him up and fucked him and fucked him around. It was a kind of gift for giving, and while he did whatever I wanted it emerged as the most important thing there was for him. It was all the harder, then, when the resentment returned and I longed for him to go.
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Alan Hollinghurst (The Swimming-Pool Library)
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There was the offer of a new challenge - you could go stale doing the same thing over and over - and being in daily contact with young, creative minds could only be invigorating
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Merryn Allingham (The Library Murders (Flora Steele, #8))
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He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.
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Virginia Woolf (A Room Of One's Own: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition)
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And one gathers from this enormous modern literature of confession and self-analysis that to write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodigious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from the writer’s mind whole and entire, Generally material circumstances are against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down. Further, accentuating all these difficulties and making them harder to bear is the world’s notorious indifference. It does not ask people to write poems and novels and histories; it does not need them. It does not care whether Flaubert finds the right word or whether Carlyle scrupulously verifies this or that fact. Naturally, it will not pay for what it does not want. And so the writer, Keats, Flaubert, Carlyle, suffers, especially in the creative years of youth, every form of distraction and discouragement. A curse, a cry of agony, rises from those books of analysis and confession. “Mighty poets in their misery dead”—that is the burden of their song. If anything comes through in spite of all this, it is a miracle, and probably no book is born entire and uncrippled as it was conceived.
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Virginia Woolf (A Room Of One's Own: The Virginia Woolf Library Authorized Edition)
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Jesus didn’t talk about a God who wants to burn this place down and take us somewhere else; he talked about the renewing of this place, the only home we’ve ever had. Central to the story of the Bible is the affirmation of trees and seas and rocks and air and soil and blood and sweat and skin and all the materiality and diversity and creativity that we know to be central to our life in this world. Jesus talked about a coming time when God would restore and renew and reconcile and redeem and make things right, and he invites us to anticipate that day by doing our part to bring heaven to earth, here, now, today.
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Rob Bell (What Is the Bible?: How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters, and Stories Can Transform the Way You Think and Feel About Everything)
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When it repudiates a past paradigm, a scientific community simultaneously renounces, as a fit subject for professional scrutiny, most of the books and articles in which that paradigm had been embodied. Scientific education makes use of no equivalent for the art museum or the library of classics, and the result is a sometimes drastic distortion in the scientist's perception of his discipline's past. More than the practitioners of other creative fields, he comes to see it as leading in a straight line to the discipline's present vantage. In short, he comes to see it as progress. No alternative is available to him while he remains in the field.
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Thomas S. Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions)
“
As a songwriter, I'm gathering clues and possibilities all the time, whether I see a piano that day or not. I've tried to explain to people how I collect these dispatches, because I think anybody can do what I'm talking about. Once I do plug in, I might get only one line and two bar phrases of the melody. I always have elements of songs around that may never ever get recorded. As far back as Little Earthquakes, I began to realize that I needed to have a library of notes, phrases, words, things that might prove useful at any given time. Within a few months' time I'll gather hundreds of those fragments. Half won't be used. And then the craft comes in, the part that is about painting a world. You want listeners to smell the lavender, to feel the point of those knitting needles in a handbag of the granny who happens to harbor a loyalty to Madame Defarge. You want the listener to know the wood's burning in the stove when they walk into the song with me. Music is about all of your senses, not just hearing.
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Tori Amos
“
When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away—even if it's only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.
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Stephen Koch (The Modern Library Writer's Workshop: A Guide to the Craft of Fiction (Modern Library Paperbacks))
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If you have a library of concepts and solutions internalized as chunked patterns, you can more easily skip to the right solution to a problem by listening to the whispers from your diffuse mode. Your diffuse mode can also help you connect two or more chunks together in new ways to solve unusual problems. There are two ways to solve problems—first, through sequential, step-by-step reasoning, and second, through more holistic intuition. Sequential thinking, where each small step leads deliberately toward the solution, involves the focused mode. Intuition, on the other hand, often seems to require a creative, diffuse mode linking of several seemingly different focused mode thoughts. Most difficult problems are solved through intuition, because they make a leap away from what you are familiar with.24 Keep in mind that the diffuse mode’s semi-random way of making connections means that the solutions it provides with should be carefully verified using the focused mode. Intuitive insights aren’t always correct!25
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Barbara Oakley (A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra))
“
Why am I holding on to this stuff? Some of this junk is losing its punch. Pictures. Pieces of paper with writing on them—I can no longer connect with the thoughts or feelings that birthed them, that drove me in that panicky desperate moment to scribble in a barely legible scrawl as if on a cave wall. All say the same thing in some form or another: “I am here. This is me in this moment.” Do I have some fantasy that this stuff will be important after I die? Do I think that scholars will be thrilled that I left such a disorganized treasure trove of creative evidence of me? Will the archives be fought over by college libraries? What will probably happen is my brother will come out with my mother and look in the boxes. My mother will hold up a VHS or a cassette and say to my brother, “Do I have a machine that plays these?” My brother will shake his head no and they will throw it all away.
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Marc Maron (Attempting Normal)
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Ask, Believe, Receive – just three simple steps to create what you want. Step one of the Creative Process is Ask. To ask, simply get clear in your mind about what you want. You can be as specific as you want. Once you have asked, know that what you want is already yours. Step two of the Creative Process is
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Rhonda Byrne (How The Secret Changed My Life: Real People. Real Stories. (The Secret Library Book 5))
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Our personal story has many chapters that reconnoiter universal themes. We each struggle to understand ourselves and aspire to make ourselves known to the world. We struggle to win the love of other people. We seek to pick all the low hanging fruit that we come across in our journey through the corridor of time. We write our story in the Niagara of emotional experiences that flowing watercourse makes us human. We use a profusion of words, symbols, and the nuances pulled from a rich library of language to depict the cascade of our visions, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings, dreams, and infelicitous thoughts. We use logical and dialectal thought processes when communing with our inner self. We use self-speak along with the esemplastic powers of poetic imagination, sprinkled with the fizz of creativity, to cohere disparate chapters of our life into a unified whole and relay the effervescence of our story to other people.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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Test the power of The Secret by asking for something small. Step three of the Creative Process is Receive. When you feel good, you are on the frequency of receiving, and the things you want will come to you. Ask once, believe you’ve received, and all you have to do to receive is feel good. Change your thoughts now, and you
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Rhonda Byrne (How The Secret Changed My Life: Real People. Real Stories. (The Secret Library Book 5))
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The first sentence of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s that reached me still jolts me every time I run into it. “Meek young men,” he wrote in “The American Scholar,” “grow up in libraries believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books…
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Robert D. Richardson Jr. (First We Read, Then We Write: Emerson on the Creative Process)
“
It’s a strange irony that most people who are truly creative don’t really know where their ideas come from. To be a writer, just like all crafts, is an art form. You can take evening classes in writing at the local library, where you go along every Tuesday night and read out your weekly piece, and that can serve to improve your expertise a little, but to be a Wrong Planet writer you have to first of all be an artist. The art of searching for words radiates from deep inside the writer, and I truly feel that when a true writer is sitting quietly at his desk his movements are beautifully interwoven. His breathing will even come with an effortless grace. The ability to move fluidly in his study in this manner begins with a truly intuitive knowledge, although if the truth were known, there’s a little bit of insanity in the writer that does everyone an awful lot of good.
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Karl Wiggins (Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe)
“
The controversy over resurrection, then, proved critical in shaping the Christian movement into an institutional religion. All Christians agreed in principle that only Christ himself—or God—can be the ultimate source of spiritual authority. But the immediate question, of course, was the practical one: Who, in the present, administers that authority? Valentinus and his followers answered: Whoever comes into direct, personal contact with the “living One.” They argued that only one’s own experience offers the ultimate criterion of truth, taking precedence over all secondhand testimony and all tradition—even gnostic tradition! They celebrated every form of creative invention as evidence that a person has become spiritually alive. On this theory, the structure of authority can never be fixed into an institutional framework: it must remain spontaneous, charismatic, and open.
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The Gnostic Gospels (Modern Library 100 Best Nonfiction Books)
“
As a species we are a predominantly intelligent and exploratory animal, and beliefs harnessed to this fact will be the most beneficial for us. A belief in the validity of the acquisition of knowledge and a scientific understanding of the world we live in, the creation and appreciation of aesthetic phenomena in all their many forms, and the broadening and deepening of our range of experiences in day-to-day living, is rapidly becoming the 'religion' of our time. Experience and understanding are our rather abstract god-figures, and ignorance and stupidity will make them angry. Our schools and universities are our religious training centres, our libraries, museums, art galleries, theatres, concert halls and sports arenas are our places of communal worship. At home we worship with our books. newspapers. magazines, radios and television sets. In a sense, we still believe in an after-life, because part of the reward obtained from our creative works is the feeling that, through them, we will 'live on' after we are dead. Like all religions, this one has its dangers, but if we have to have one, and it seems that we do, then it certainly appears to be the one most suitable for the unique biological qualities of our species. Its adoption by an ever-growing majority of the world population can serve as a compensating and reassuring source of optimism to set against the pessimism (...) concerning our immediate future as a surviving species.
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Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape)
“
I love being busy, I'm very creative, I'm very inventive, and there are a lot of people a lot smater than me but I've always said I'm a very professional Dolly Parton, I know what I can do what I want to do, and what I believe is best for me.
Like when I started the imagination library, I wanted to have a charity that was something that I could believe and, something that meant something that was personal to me. And so that's how I built my whole life whether it be the theme park, production companies, or whatever.
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Dolly Parton (Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones)
“
We decided to attend to our community instead of asking our community to attend the church.” His staff started showing up at local community events such as sports contests and town hall meetings. They entered a float in the local Christmas parade. They rented a football field and inaugurated a Free Movie Night on summer Fridays, complete with popcorn machines and a giant screen. They opened a burger joint, which soon became a hangout for local youth; it gives free meals to those who can’t afford to pay. When they found out how difficult it was for immigrants to get a driver’s license, they formed a drivers school and set their fees at half the going rate. My own church in Colorado started a ministry called Hands of the Carpenter, recruiting volunteers to do painting, carpentry, and house repairs for widows and single mothers. Soon they learned of another need and opened Hands Automotive to offer free oil changes, inspections, and car washes to the same constituency. They fund the work by charging normal rates to those who can afford it. I heard from a church in Minneapolis that monitors parking meters. Volunteers patrol the streets, add money to the meters with expired time, and put cards on the windshields that read, “Your meter looked hungry so we fed it. If we can help you in any other way, please give us a call.” In Cincinnati, college students sign up every Christmas to wrap presents at a local mall — no charge. “People just could not understand why I would want to wrap their presents,” one wrote me. “I tell them, ‘We just want to show God’s love in a practical way.’ ” In one of the boldest ventures in creative grace, a pastor started a community called Miracle Village in which half the residents are registered sex offenders. Florida’s state laws require sex offenders to live more than a thousand feet from a school, day care center, park, or playground, and some municipalities have lengthened the distance to half a mile and added swimming pools, bus stops, and libraries to the list. As a result, sex offenders, one of the most despised categories of criminals, are pushed out of cities and have few places to live. A pastor named Dick Witherow opened Miracle Village as part of his Matthew 25 Ministries. Staff members closely supervise the residents, many of them on parole, and conduct services in the church at the heart of Miracle Village. The ministry also provides anger-management and Bible study classes.
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Philip Yancey (Vanishing Grace: What Ever Happened to the Good News?)
“
Virginia Woolf says that a woman needs money and a room of her own if she wants to write fiction,’ Ella said. ‘Write fiction?’ ‘You could substitute painting for fiction,’ Ella said. ‘It’s the same sentiment. Virginia Woolf was saying male and female creative experiences are worlds apart. A man can just get on with it because he probably earns money of his own and has a woman behind him doing all the practical life stuff, like cooking and bringing up the children. A woman in her day couldn’t hope to write a book unless she had independent money and a room of her own. And things haven’t changed as much as we’d like.
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Kate Storey (The Memory Library)
“
Do you want to study under the great teachers? Is that it? Well, you can find them anywhere. They live on the shelves of your library; they live on the walls of museums; they live in recordings made decades ago. Your teachers don’t even need to be alive to educate you masterfully. No living writer has ever taught me more about plotting and characterization than Charles Dickens has taught me—and needless to say, I never met with him during office hours to discuss it. All I had to do in order to learn from Dickens was to spend years privately studying his novels like they were holy scripture, and then to practice like the devil on my own.
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Elizabeth Gilbert (Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear)
“
Theirs was a harrowing and impossible mission, yes, but Robin also found a certain exhilarating pleasure in this work. This creative problem-solving, this breaking up of a momentous mission into a dozen small tasks which, combined with enormous luck and possibly divine intervention, might carry them to victory - it all reminded him of how it felt to be in the library working on a thorny translation at four in the morning, laughing hysterically because they were so unbelievably tired but somehow thrumming with energy because it was such a thrill when a solution inevitably coalesced from their mess of scrawled notes and wild brainstorming.
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R.F. Kuang (Babel)
“
It is not to his own age, but to those following, and especially to our own time, that we are to look for the shaping and enormous influence upon human life of the genius of this poet. And it is measured not by the libraries of comments that his works have called forth, but by the prevalence of the language and thought of his poetry in all subsequent literature, and by its entrance into the current of common thought and speech. It may be safely said that the English-speaking world and almost every individual of it are different from what they would have been if Shakespeare had never lived. Of all the forces that have survived out of his creative time, he is one of the chief.
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William Shakespeare (Complete Works of William Shakespeare)
“
Tackle a clearly identified and isolated task. If you have to write an article, for example, do the research ahead of time, so that when you get to your focus block you can put your word processor in fullscreen mode and turn your entire attention to your prose. Consider using a different location for these blocks. Move to a different room, or a library, or even a quiet place outside to perform your focused work. When possible, do your work with pen and paper to avoid even the possibility of online distraction. The battle between focus and distraction is a serious problem—both to the competitiveness of our companies and to our own sanity. The amount of value lost to unchecked use of convenient but distracting work habits is staggering. The focus block method described above does not fix this problem, but it does give you a way to push back against its worst excesses, systematically producing important creative work even when your environment seems designed to thwart this goal.
”
”
Jocelyn K. Glei (Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind)
“
The California Board of Education provides, through its virtual libraries, a book intended for kindergarten teachers to read to their students: Who Are You? The Kid’s Guide to Gender Identity by Brook Pessin-Whedbee.19 The author begins with a familiar origin story: “Babies can’t talk, so grown-ups make a guess by looking at their bodies. This is the sex assigned to you at birth, male or female.”20 This author runs the gamut of typical kindergarten gender identity instruction. Who Are You? offers kids a smorgasbord of gender options. (“These are just a few words people use: trans, genderqueer, non-binary, gender fluid, transgender, gender neutral, agender, neutrois, bigender, third gender, two-spirit….”) The way baby boomers once learned to rattle off state capitals, elementary school kids are now taught today’s gender taxonomy often enough to have committed it to memory. And while gender ideologues insist they are merely presenting an objective ontology, it is hard to miss that they seem to hope kids will pick a fun, “gender-creative”21 option for themselves.
”
”
Abigail Shrier (Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters)
“
At the end of the process a decisive defeat in war may bring a final blow, or barbarian invasion from without may combine with barbarism from within to bring the civilization to a close.
Is this a depressing picture? Not quite. Life has no inherent claim to eternity, whether in individuals or in states. Death is natural, and if it comes in due time it is forgivable and useful, and the mature mind will take no offense from its coming. But do civilizations die? Again, not quite. Greek civilization is not really dead; only its frame is gone and its habitat has changed and spread; it survives in the memory of the race, and in such abundance that no one life, however full and long, could absorb it all. Homer has more readers now than in his own day and land. The Greek poets and philosophers are in every library and college; at this moment Plato is being studied by a hundred thousand discoverers of the "dear delight" of philosophy overspreading life with understanding thought. This selective survival of creative minds is the most real and beneficent of immortalities.
”
”
Will Durant (The Lessons of History)
“
It always felt good to see Sister Charlotte, a retired teacher who would occasionally substitute in our class. She always allowed us private reading time, which we appreciated. One day in class, she asked me about my library book, Chaim Potok’s The Chosen. I told her that the story dealt with family problems and a son who had a tough choice to make, one that would be good for him but would displease his father. “Ah, universal theme,” said Sister. “Offspring challenging parents’ old ways. It’s normal. It’s natural. It’s called evolution.” “What about Christ?” I asked. “He obeyed His father’s wishes.” “Ah,” replied Sister, unperturbed. “Yes, I see what you mean.” “What do you think, Sister?” I sensed my questions were welcome, that Sister liked me. “Well, I answered that question one way when I entered this Order at sixteen years old. Today, I’d respond differently.” “How, Sister?” “Well, I think I’d jump right into my own creative life, yes, dive right in, no hesitation. I hope you do that, Eleanor. All our answers lie there but each of us must earn her own autonomy, so I’ll say no more.
”
”
Eleanor Cowan (A History of a Pedophile's Wife: Memoir of a Canadian Teacher and Writer)
“
Then, in 1950, Andy became something more than a model prisoner. In 1950, he became a valuable commodity, a murderer who did tax-returns better than H & R Block. He gave gratis estate-planning advice, set up tax-shelters, filled out loan applications (sometimes creatively). I can remember him sitting behind his desk in the library, patiently going over a car-loan agreement paragraph by paragraph with a screwhead who wanted to buy a used DeSoto, telling the guy what was good about the agreement and what was bad about it, explaining to him that it was possible to shop for a loan and not get hit quite so bad, steering him away from the finance companies, which in those days were sometimes little better than legal loan-sharks. When he’d finished, the screwhead started to put out his hand . . . and then drew it back to himself quickly. He’d forgotten for a moment, you see, that he was dealing with a mascot, not a man. Andy kept up on the tax laws and the changes in the stock market, and so his usefulness didn’t end after he’d been in cold storage for awhile, as it might have done. He began to get his library money, his running war with the sisters had ended, and nobody tossed his cell very hard. He was a good nigger.
”
”
Stephen King (Different Seasons: Four Novellas)
“
Congress decided to put him on a committee to write a declaration explaining why the colonies were seeking independence. It was back in the days when Congress knew how to appoint really good committees: Franklin and Jefferson and John Adams were on it. They knew that leadership required not merely asserting values, but finding a balance when values conflict. We can see that in the deft editing of the famous sentence that opens the second paragraph of the Declaration. “We hold these truths to be sacred . . . ,” Jefferson had written. On the copy of his draft at the Library of Congress we can see the dark printer’s ink and backslashes of Franklin’s pen as he changes it to “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” His point was that our rights would come from rationality and the consent of the governed, not the dictates and dogma of any religion. Jefferson’s draft sentence went on to say that all men have certain inalienable rights. We can see Adams’s hand making an addition: “They are endowed by their Creator” with these inalienable rights. So just in the editing of one half of one sentence we can see how Franklin and his colleagues struck a unifying balance between the grace of divine providence and the role of democratic consent in the founding values of our nation.
”
”
Walter Isaacson (American Sketches: Great Leaders, Creative Thinkers & Heroes of a Hurricane)
“
She Is Remarkable
Salute to the woman who knows who she is
And why she is who she is
A powerful being
Once thrown into the deep end of the ocean
But swam her way back to shore
She never stops moving forward
Nothing can ever pull her backwards
Such a brave warrior
Shout out to the superwoman
Determined to change the status quo
Because she feels the need to do so
Just like an eagle
She soars higher and higher
As the wind blows stronger
She does not let anything deter her
From reaching another level in life
Thumbs up to an amazing woman
A great force to be reckoned with
That committed Mother on the street
Who trades from sunrise to sunset
Trying to make ends meet
Oh, she has a heart so big
Being mindful that come snow or sunshine
She has mouths to feed
I revere this gifted woman
Who uses her creativity
To make an impact in society
Despite the uniqueness of her talent
She remains a trendsetter
It could be the potter in whose hands clay becomes magic
The miner who touches gold, before it even gets sold to the markets
Or the strategist who sits in high-level meetings, making sure organisations do not collapse
A special mention to the special woman
Who chooses not to give up
She understands that others look up to her
The smart lady out there, with a clear vision
She makes things happen for her family, community, and the world at large
She deserves a badge of honour
Because she is remarkable!
”
”
Gift Gugu Mona (From My Mother's Classroom: A Badge of Honour for a Remarkable Woman)
“
School Library Journal
Gr 3–6—This interactive manual is fun to read and even more fun to put into practice. From hopscotch to dodge ball, jacks to solitaire, and string games to memory games, all types of activities are included. Games to play with a ball, with cards, in a car on the go, alone, or in a group are all here to be enjoyed. The instructions are clear and easy to follow. There are also historical and factual asides for many of the entries. Some include variations on the main game or alternate names for the activity that have been used through the years. The illustrations depict children demonstrating a particular aspect of a game or just enjoying themselves playing. This is a great resource for parents and teachers, as well as for children.—Cynde Suite, Bartow County Library System, Adairsville, GA
”
”
J.J. Ferrer (The Art of Stone Skipping and Other Fun Old-Time Games: Stoopball, Jacks, String Games, Coin Flipping, Line Baseball, Jump Rope, and More)
“
Squealing, Ashley threw her arms around Miranda, while Gage ducked swiftly out of the way.
“You’ll get used to her, Miranda,” Parker sighed, pulling Ashley back.
But Ashley broke free at once. “Miss Dupree loved your idea! She can’t wait to see how we put it all together. She says it’s the most original and creative topic in the whole class!”
“Make that the most ridiculous,” Parker mutter.
Miranda tried valiantly to resist Ashley’s hug. “Hey. It wasn’t my idea--”
“Don’t be so modest! Of course it was!” Giving Miranda one last squeeze, Ashley got down to business. “Okay. So we’ll all meet at the library later and start our planning. You can come, can’t you, Miranda?”
“Well, I--”
Parker’s loud groan cut her off. “Oh please, not the library. All that whispering gives me a headache.”
“You are a headache.” Roo yawned.
“Let’s just go to The Tavern. I need background music.”
“Too crowded. Too noisy.” Shaking his head, Gage leaned in toward Miranda. “It’s a restaurant,” he explained. “Not much to look at, but the food’s great. Everybody hangs out there.”
Roo did a thumbs-down. “Two no votes for The Tavern. It won’t get dark for a while--why don’t we just go to the Falls?”
Looks passed from one to another, followed by nods all around.
“Have you seen the bayou yet, Miranda?” Gage asked, while she fumbled for an excuse.
“Not exactly. I mean, sort of, from a distance. But really, I don’t think I can--”
“Then this’ll be a first for you!” Ashley was delighted. “We’ll be right on the bayou.”
Parker nodded, deadpan. “Alligators and water moccasins, up close and personal.”
“Oh, Parker, for heaven’s sake. Don’t listen to him, Miranda. I’ve never seen any nasty things around there.”
“Except for Roo,” Parker added. “She can be pretty nasty.”
Roo pointedly ignored him. The boys grinned, and Ashley chattered on.
”
”
Richie Tankersley Cusick (Walk of the Spirits (Walk, #1))
“
Every Sunday, the Weavers drove their Oldsmobile east toward Waterloo and pulled into the gravel parking lot of the Cedarloo Baptist Church, on a hill between Waterloo and Cedar Falls, took their place in the pews, and listened to the minister. But there seemed to be no fire or passion, no sense of what was really happening in the world. They’d tried other churches and found congregations interested in what God had done 2,000 years ago, but no one paying attention to what God was doing right then. Certainly, churches weren’t addressing the crime in Cedar Falls, the drugs, or the sorry state of schools and government, not to mention the kind of danger that Hal Lindsey described. They would have to find the truth themselves. They began doing their own research, especially Vicki. She had quit work to raise Sara, and later Samuel, who was born in April 1978. When Sara started school, Randy and Vicki couldn’t believe the pagan things she was being taught. They refused to allow her to dress up for Halloween—Satan’s holiday—and decided they had to teach Sara at home. But that was illegal in Iowa. A booster shot of religion came with cable television and The PTL Club, the 700 Club, and Jerry Falwell. The small television in the kitchen was on all the time for a while, but most of Vicki’s free time was spent reading. She’s lose herself in the Cedar Falls public library, reading the science fiction her dad had introduced her to as a kid, the novels and self-help books friends recommended, biblical histories, political tracts, and obscure books that she discovered on her own. Like a painter, she pulled out colors and hues that fit with the philosophy she and Randy were discovering, and everywhere she looked there seemed to be something guiding them toward “the truth,” and, at the same time, pulling them closer together. She spent hours in the library, and when she found something that fit, she passed it along first to Randy, who might read the book himself and then spread it to everyone—the people at work, in the neighborhood, at the coffee shop where he hung out. They read books from fringe organizations and groups, picking through the philosophies, taking what they agreed with and discarding the rest. Yet some of the books that influenced them came from the mainstream, such as Ayn Rand’s classic libertarian novel Atlas Shrugged. Vicki found its struggle between the individual and the state prophetic and its action inspiring. The book shows a government so overbearing and immoral that creative people, led by a self-reliant protagonist, go on strike and move to the mountains. “‘You will win,’” the book’s protagonist cries from his mountain hideout, “‘when you are ready to pronounce the oath I have taken at the start of my battle—and for those who wish to know the day of my return, I shall now repeat it to the hearing of the world: “‘I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live my life for the sake of another man, nor ask another to live for mine.
”
”
Jess Walter (Ruby Ridge: The Truth and Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family)
“
From Microsoft OneNote, Google Keep, and Apple Notes to Notion and Evernote, digital notes apps have four powerful characteristics that make them ideal for building a Second Brain. They are: Multimedia: Just like a paper notebook might contain drawings and sketches, quotes and ideas, and even a pasted photo or Post-it, a notes app can store a wide variety of different kinds of content in one place, so you never need to wonder where to put something. Informal: Notes are inherently messy, so there’s no need for perfect spelling or polished presentation. This makes it as easy and frictionless as possible to jot things down as soon as they occur to you, which is essential to allow nascent ideas to grow. Open-ended: Taking notes is a continuous process that never really ends, and you don’t always know where it might lead. Unlike more specialized kinds of software that are designed to produce a specific kind of output (such as slide decks, spreadsheets, graphics, or videos), notes are ideal for free-form exploration before you have a goal in mind. Action-oriented: Unlike a library or research database, personal notes don’t need to be comprehensive or precise. They are designed to help you quickly capture stray thoughts so you can remain focused on the task at hand.
”
”
Tiago Forte (Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential)
“
We expect to find a strict set of rules that tells us exactly where each item goes, like the precise call numbers for books in a library. When it comes to our personal knowledge, there is no such assigned spot. We are organizing for actionability, and “what’s actionable” is always changing. Sometimes we can receive one text message or email and the entire landscape of our day changes. Because
”
”
Tiago Forte (Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential)
“
Two hours later, Nesta found herself fully clothed in a bathtub in the middle of the private library, the entire thing filled with bubbles. No water, just bubbles. In matching tubs on either side of her, Emerie and Gwyn were giggling. 'This is ridiculous,' Nesta said, even as her mouth curved upward.
Each one of their requests had gotten more and more absurd, and Nesta might have felt like they were exploiting the House had it not been so... exuberant in answering their commands. Adding creative flourishes.
Like the fact that each bubble held a tiny bird fluttering about inside.
Silent fireworks still exploded in the far corner of the room, and a miniature pegasus- Nesta's request, made only when her friends goaded her into submitting one- fed on a small patch of grass by the shelf, content to ignore them. A cake taller than Cassian stood in the centre of the room, lit with a thousand candles. Six frogs danced circles around a red-and-white-spotted toadstool, the waltzes provided by Nesta's Symphonia.
Emerie wore a diamond crown and six strings of pearls. Gwyn sported a broad-brimmed hat fit for any fine lady, perched at a rakish angle on her head. A lace parasol leaned against her other shoulder, and she twirled it idly as she surveyed the windows...
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Silver Flames (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #4))
“
I was fifty-eight years old when I finally felt like a “master choreographer.” The occasion was my 128th ballet, The Brahms-Haydn Variations, created for American Ballet Theatre. For the first time in my career I felt in control of all the components that go into making a dance—the music, the steps, the patterns, the deployment of people onstage, the clarity of purpose. Finally I had the skills to close the gap between what I could see in my mind and what I could actually get onto the stage. Why did it take 128 pieces before I felt this way? A better question would be, Why not? What’s wrong with getting better as you get more work under your belt? The libraries and archives and museums are packed with early bloomers and one-trick ponies who said everything they had to say in their first novel, who could only compose one good tune, whose canvases kept repeating the same dogged theme. My respect has always gone to those who are in it for the long haul. When people who have demonstrated talent fizzle out or disappear after early creative success, it’s not because their gifts, that famous “one percent inspiration,” abandoned them; more likely they abandoned their gift through a failure of perspiration.
”
”
Twyla Tharp (The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life (Learn In and Use It for Life))
“
loving, creative, resourceful, and full of vitality.
”
”
Eknath Easwaran (Conquest of Mind: Take Charge of Your Thoughts and Reshape Your Life Through Meditation (Essential Easwaran Library Book 3))
“
Ideas! Ideas! They are the fuel that keeps a brain functioning at a high level, and fortunately one does not have to invent one’s own; choice ideas from the past are easily available in any good library or university or on the job, if one looks. Ideas have been the joy of my life and in my ninth decade I am still striving to understand those that lie beyond my grasp while finding great comfort in those I do understand.”
—Chapter VII, “Ideas”, page 259
”
”
James A. Michener
“
To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start. Better late than never, of course. Do you feel up to it?
It means you must still take long walks at night around your city or town, or walks in the country by day. And long walks, at any time, through bookstores and libraries.
”
”
Ray Bradbury (Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You)
“
For an idea generation session, extract yourself from your everyday surroundings and go to a café, a library or a park. Thinking about ideas for 2 hours at an unusual location may bring you more ideas than a day of staring at the computer screen in the office. Don’t think too hard about where to think, because any place that you don’t visit regularly will stimulate your creative brain.
”
”
Andrii Sedniev (The Business Idea Factory: A World-Class System for Creating Successful Business Ideas)
“
Nick wanted to meet on campus at Love Library. (That was the actual name; thank you for your donation, Mayor Don Lathrop Love.)
”
”
Rainbow Rowell (Fangirl)
“
capital expenditures required in Clean Technology are so incredibly high,” says Pritzker, “that I didn’t feel that I could do anything to make an impact, so I became interested in digital media, and established General Assembly in January 2010, along with Jake Schwartz, Brad Hargreaves and Matthew Brimer.” In less than two years GA had to double its space. In June 2012, they opened a second office in a nearby building. Since then, GA’s courses been attended by 15,000 students, the school has 70 full-time employees in New York, and it has begun to export its formula abroad—first to London and Berlin—with the ambitious goal of creating a global network of campuses “for technology, business and design.” In each location, Pritzker and his associates seek cooperation from the municipal administration, “because the projects need to be understood and supported also by the local authorities in a public-private partnership.” In fact, the New York launch was awarded a $200,000 grant from Mayor Bloomberg. “The humanistic education that we get in our universities teaches people to think critically and creatively, but it does not provide the skills to thrive in the work force in the 21st century,” continues Pritzker. “It’s also true that the college experience is valuable. The majority of your learning does not happen in the classroom. It happens in your dorm room or at dinner with friends. Even geniuses such as Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, who both left Harvard to start their companies, came up with their ideas and met their co-founders in college.” Just as a college campus, GA has classrooms, whiteboard walls, a library, open spaces for casual meetings and discussions, bicycle parking, and lockers for personal belongings. But the emphasis is on “learning by doing” and gaining knowledge from those who are already working. Lectures can run the gamut from a single evening to a 16-week course, on subjects covering every conceivable matter relevant to technology startups— from how to create a web site to how to draw a logo, from seeking funding to hiring employees. But adjacent to the lecture halls, there is an area that hosts about 30 active startups in their infancy. “This is the core of our community,” says Pritzker, showing the open space that houses the startups. “Statistically, not all of these companies are going to do well. I do believe, though, that all these people will. The cost of building technology is dropping so low that people can actually afford to take the risk to learn by doing something that, in our minds, is a much more effective way to learn than anything else. It’s entrepreneurs who are in the field, learning by doing, putting journey before destination.” “Studying and working side by side is important, because from the interaction among people and the exchange of ideas, even informal, you learn, and other ideas are born,” Pritzker emphasizes: “The Internet has not rendered in-person meetings obsolete and useless. We chose these offices just to be easily accessible by all—close to Union Square where almost every subway line stops—in particular those coming from Brooklyn, where many of our students live.
”
”
Maria Teresa Cometto (Tech and the City: The Making of New York's Startup Community)
“
The purpose of the Sisterhood of Librarians is to keep the secret of creative juice and keep the idea of libraries alive.
”
”
S.A. Tawks (The Spirit of Imagination (The Spirit of Imagination, #1))
“
Flickr is no such thing, just as Google is not operating a library. They are commercial enterprises designed to maximize revenue, not defend political expression, preserve our collective heritage, or facilitate creativity, and the people who work there are private employees, not public servants.7
”
”
Astra Taylor (The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age)
“
her only comfort was to curse each searing day with a creative lexicon she didn’t know she possessed.
”
”
Bentley Little (The Best of Horror Library: Volumes 1-5)
“
Brittany has been wary this whole week. She’s waiting for me to play a joke on her, to get her back for tossing my keys into the woods. After school, as I’m at my locker picking books to take home, she storms up to me wearing her sexy pom uniform.
“Meet me in the wrestling gym,” she orders.
Now I can do two things: meet her like she told me to or leave the school. I take my books and enter the small gym. Brittany is standing, holding out her keychain without keys dangling from it.
“Where have my keys magically disappeared to?” she asks. “I’m going to be late for the game if you don’t tell me. Ms. Small will kick me off the squad if I’m not at the game.”
“I tossed them somewhere. You know, you should really get a purse that has a zipper. You never know when someone will reach in and grab somethin’.”
“Glad to know you’re a klepto. Wanna give me a hint as to where you’ve hidden them?”
I lean against the wall of the wrestling gym, thinking about what people would think if they caught us in here together. “It’s in a place that’s wet. Really, really wet,” I say, giving her a clue.
“The pool?”
I nod. “Creative, huh?”
She tries to push me into the wall. “Oh, I’m going to kill you. You better go get them.”
If I didn’t know her better, I’d think she was flirting with me. I think she likes this game we have going on. “Mamacita, you should know me better than that. You’re all on your own, like I was when you left me in the library parking lot.”
She cocks her head, gives me sad eyes, and pouts. I shouldn’t concentrate on her pouty lips, it’s dangerous. But I can’t help it.
“Show me where they are, Alex. Please.”
I let her sweat it out a minute before I give in. By now most of the school is deserted. Half of the students are on their way to the football game. The other half is glad they’re not on their way to the football game.
We walk to the pool. The lights are off, but sunlight is still shining through the windows. Brittany’s keys are where I threw ‘em--in the middle of the deep end. I point to the shiny pieces of silver under the water. “There they are. Have at it.”
Brittany stands with her hands on her short skirt, contemplating how she’s going to get them. She struts over to the long stick hanging on the wall that’s used to pull drowning people from the water. “Piece of cake,” she tells me.
But as she sticks the pole into the water, she finds out it’s not a piece of cake. I suppress a laugh as I stand at the edge of the pool and watch her attempt the impossible.
“You can always strip and go in naked. I’ll watch to make sure nobody comes in.”
She walks up to me, the pole gripped firmly in her fingers. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“Uh, yeah,” I say, stating the obvious. “I have to warn you, though. If you have granny undies on, you’ll blow my fantasy.”
“For your information, they’re pink satin. As long as we’re sharing personal info, are you a boxers or briefs guy?”
“Neither. My boys go free, if you know what I mean.” Okay, I don’t let my boys go free. She’ll just have to figure that out herself.
“Gross, Alex.”
“Don’t knock it till you try it,” I tell her, then walk toward the door.
“You’re leaving?”
“Uh…yeah.”
“Aren’t you going to help me get the keys?”
“Uh…nope.” If I stay, I’ll be tempted to ask her to ditch the football game to be with me. I’m definitely not ready to hear the answer to that question. Toying with her I can handle. Showing my true colors like I did the other day made me take my guard down. I’m not about to do that again. I push the door open after taking one last glance at Brittany, wondering if leaving her right now makes me an idiot, a jerk, a coward, or all of the above.
”
”
Simone Elkeles (Perfect Chemistry (Perfect Chemistry, #1))
“
Exclusive rights to publish and sell this book in print form in English are licensed to The MIT Press. All other rights are reserved by the author. An electronic version of this book is available under a Creative Commons license. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email special_sales@mitpress.mit.edu or write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, 5 Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142. Set in Stone sans and Stone serif by The MIT Press. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hippel, Eric von. Democratizing innovation / Eric von Hippel.
”
”
Eric von Hippel (Democratizing Innovation)
“
Turn your thoughts to novel writing—narrative, let it be about what it will, is read, because the mind quietly acquiesces, and it requires no trouble to think about it. On your part it will demand much less care in the composition. Never mind improbabilities—put together a sufficient number of facts—the more unlikely the better. If you are too idle to choose the trouble of inventing, collect eight or nine of the most popular works of that sort; take a piece of one, and a piece of another, and put them together, only a little altered, just to disguise them: never mind whether what the painters call keeping, can in this motley assemblage be attended to; nobody thinks about that: sprinkle the whole plentifully with horrors of some sort or other, to stimulate the languid attention, and you will have a certainty of a sale at least among the circulating libraries, which, after all, is the principal sale that can be expected; for who buy novels?—Who indeed buy books at all in these times?
”
”
Charlotte Turner Smith (Marchmont: A Novel (Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints))
“
he had none of the enthusiastic love of liberty which marks the independent creative spirit. On the contrary, he was dominated by the purely Asiatic conception of a monopoly of press, speech, justice, and thought by a single ruling caste, agreeing therein with the alleged Moslem saying that if the library of Alexandria contained the same things as the Koran it was useless, and if it contained things contrary it was harmful.
”
”
Anonymous
“
The dying mall has attracted some odd tenants, such as a satellite branch of the public library and an office of the State Attorney General's Child Predator Unit. As malls die across the country, we'll see many kinds of creative repurposing. Already, there are churches and casinos inside half-dead malls, so why not massage parlors, detox centers, transient hotels, haunted houses, prisons, petting zoos or putt-putt golf courses (covering the entire mall)? Leaving Santee, Chuck and I wandered into the food court, where only three of twelve restaurant slots were still occupied. On the back wall of this forlorn and silent space was a mural put up by Boscov, the mall's main tenant. Titled "B part of your community", it reads:
KINDNESS COUNTS / PLANT A TREE / MAKE A DONATION / HELP A NEIGHBOR / VISIT THE ELDERLY / HOPE / ADOPT A PET / DRIVE A HYBRID / PICK UP THE TRASH / VOLUNTEER / CONSERVE ENERGY / RECYCLE / JOIN SOMETHING / PAINT A MURAL / HUG SOMEONE / SMILE / DRINK FILTERED WATER / GIVE YOUR TIME / USE SOLAR ENERGY / FEED THE HUNGRY / ORGANIZE A FUNDRAISER / CREATE AWARENESS / FIX A PLAYGROUND/ START A CLUB / BABYSIT
These empty recommendations are about as effective as "Just Say No", I'm afraid. As the CIA pushed drugs, the first lady chirped, "Just say no!". And since everything in the culture, car, iPad, iPhone, television, internet, Facebook, Twitter and shopping mall, etc., is designed to remove you from your immediate surroundings, it will take more than cutesy suggestions on walls to rebuild communities. Also, the worse the neighborhoods or contexts, the more hopeful and positive the slogans. Starved of solutions, we shall eat slogans.
”
”
Linh Dinh (Postcards from the End of America)
“
Purpose is the lens through
which you perceive creativity. It
helps you overcome any negativity
by empowering you to unleash your
productivity.
”
”
Gift Gugu Mona (Your Life, Your Purpose: 365 Motivational Quotes)
“
Purpose is the expression of
God’s will and creativity that is
connected to a glorious destiny.
”
”
Gift Gugu Mona (Your Life, Your Purpose: 365 Motivational Quotes)
“
Purpose is the expression of God’s will and creativity that is connected to a glorious destiny.
”
”
Gift Gugu Mona (Your Life, Your Purpose: 365 Motivational Quotes)
“
Purpose is the lens through which you perceive creativity. It helps you overcome any negativity by empowering you to unleash your productivity.
”
”
Gift Gugu Mona (Your Life, Your Purpose: 365 Motivational Quotes)
“
You have it in you to work smart and discover the best solutions in life. Allow yourself to tap into your creative abilities, resourcefulness, and problem-solving skills and achieve extraordinary results.
”
”
Gift Gugu Mona (365 Motivational Life Lessons)
“
I believe the root of this strength of will came from my mother and father, from the work they taught me to do in the borderlands, the work that had broken many backs, the work that was a scream against the desert dust, this work that taught me about the song of nothingness in my bones and why the only way to live was to die on my feet.
”
”
Sergio Troncoso (A Peculiar Kind of Immigrant's Son)
“
The goal of becoming more productive is not to work more but the opposite. The goal is to get your work done in less time so that you can spend more time with your friends and family. If you work too many hours, then both your creativity and productivity suffer. It’s not worth spending 12 hours every day in the office and neglecting all other aspects of your life. Sometimes, it might be necessary, but not all the time.
”
”
Library Mindset (The Art of Laziness: Overcome Procrastination & Improve Your Productivity)
“
You are creative, funny, clever, smart and cute. If the man doesn’t see all of that, he is not worth a second of your time. Now get out there and stop being such a ninny.
”
”
Jenn McKinlay (A Likely Story (Library Lover's Mystery, #6))
“
Like circles of artists today, gnostics considered original creative invention to be the mark of anyone who becomes spiritually alive. Each one, like students of a painter or writer, expected to express his own perceptions by revising and transforming what he was taught.
”
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Elaine Pagels (The Gnostic Gospels (Modern Library 100 Best Nonfiction Books))
“
You have it in you to work smart and discover the best solutions in life. Allow yourself to tap into your creative abilities, resourcefulness, and problem-solving skills if you desire to achieve extraordinary results.
”
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Gift Gugu Mona (365 Motivational Life Lessons)
“
If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling.
You must write every single day of your life.
You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.
You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.
I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime.
I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you.
May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories—science fiction or otherwise.
Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days.
And out of that love, remake a world.
”
”
Ray Bradbury
“
Data sources All these components give you feedback and insight into how best to configure your campaigns, although the data sources are often spread around in different places and sometimes difficult to find and interpret. Campaign types Search & Partner Dynamic Search Display Network Remarketing & Dynamic Remarketing Google Shopping for eCommerce Google Merchant Center Data feeds Google Shopping Campaigns Device selection PC / Tablets Mobiles & Smartphones Location Targets & Exclusions Country Metro State City Custom and Radius Daily Budgets Manual CPC Enhanced CPC Flexible Bidding strategies Conversion Optimizer (CPA) Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) Conversion Tracking Setup and configuration Transaction-Specific Conversion Tracking Offline Conversion import Phone call tracking - website call conversions Conversion Rates Conversion Costs Conversion Values Ad Groups Default Bids Keyword Themes Ads Ad Messaging & Demographics Creative Text & Formatting Images* Display Ad Builder* Ad Preview and Diagnosis Account, Campaign and Ad Group Ad Extensions Sitelinks Locations Calls Reviews Apps Callouts Ad Rotation & Frequency Capping Rotate Optimise for Clicks Optimise for Conversions Keywords Bids Broad Modified Broad Phrase Exact Destination urls Keyword Diagnosis User Search Queries Keyword Opportunities Negative Keywords & Match Types Shared Library Shared Budgets* Automated Rules Flexible Bid Strategies Audiences & Exclusions* Campaign Negative Keywords Display Campaign Placement Exclusions* NEW! Business Data and Ad Customizers Advanced Delivery Methods Standard Accelerated Impression Share Lost IS (Budget) Lost IS (Rank) Search Funnels Assisted Impressions & Clicks Assisted Conversions Segmentation Analysis Device performance Network performance Top vs Other position performance Dimension Analysis Days & Times Shopping Geographic User Locations & Distance Search Terms Automatic Placements* Call Details (Call Extensions) Tools Change history Keyword Planner* Display Planner* Opportunities* Scheduling & Day Parting Automated Rules Competitor Ad Auction Insights Reporting* AdWords Campaign Experiments* Browser Languages* *indicates an item not covered in this version of the book
”
”
David Rothwell (The Google Ads (AdWords) Bible for eCommerce: How to Sell More Products with Google Ads (The Clicks to Money Series))
“
There Is A Superwoman
Her name may not be popular
Have never seen her face on a billboard
But she is worth more!
She may not have much in her pocket
Yet she makes a plan for survival
On her own, she is a survivor
She loves, she laughs
Even when her heart is bleeding
She puts smiles on other people’s faces
Secures a good future for her offspring
From autumn to spring, she is reliable
Like a rare gem, she is so valuable
Her wisdom is beyond understanding
A unique creative
Always in the art of making history
Great contributor to society
Wonderful soul she is
Real fighter for her rights
Who changes many lives
Superpower in the universe
No matter what comes her way
She can handle it
You know why?
She is a Superwoman
”
”
Gift Gugu Mona (From My Mother's Classroom: A Badge of Honour for a Remarkable Woman)
“
Elaine Biech, in Training for Dummies, writes that trainers should build interest in the session from the start. “Save the ground rules and the housekeeping details for later. Be creative with your opening. … Participants will want to know what’s in it for them: how what they learn will be useful to them personally or how it will make their jobs easier.
”
”
Lori Reed (Workplace Learning & Leadership: A Handbook for Library and Nonprofit Trainers)
“
What were you doing? This lot said you were over there," he growled, pointing to the section of the library he'd just searched.
Rosa batted her lashes. "I went to see how Plunger was getting on. He's slowing down our work by trying to use his dick as a paintbrush."
Plunger shrugged like that wasn't unusual behaviour. "It is the way of my crea-tiv-it-ai."
“It’s creativit- tee ,
”
”
Caroline Peckham (Alpha Wolf (Darkmore Penitentiary, #2))
“
You have to be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up.
Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else—that’s how you’ll
get ahead.
Google everything. I mean everything. Google your dreams, Google your
problems. Don’t ask a question before you Google it. You’ll either find the
answer or you’ll come up with a better question.
Always be reading. Go to the library. There’s magic in being surrounded by
books. Get lost in the stacks. Read bibliographies. It’s not the book you start
with, it’s the book that book leads you to.
”
”
Austin Kleon (Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative)
“
If you had to pick a favorite place where you live, what would it be? It could be an inspiring place like a beautiful park or a lookout point. Or it could be a library, a café, or even your own front yard. Once you’ve settled on a special spot, bring sketching, writing, or painting supplies to this place. Make sure you have a comfortable spot to sit, then observe your surroundings. Notice the details, from the smells and sounds to the emotions you experience, as you sit. Now try to re-create this space in the creative medium of your choice — a story, poem, drawing, song, comic book, short movie — whatever you want. Express yourself via your chosen art medium. It doesn’t have to be perfect. When you’re done, challenge yourself to share your work with at least one person.
”
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Aubre Andrus (Project You: More Than 50 Ways to Calm Down, De-Stress, and Feel Great (Switch Press:))
“
Being neurotic isn't all that bad. Neurotics tend to be intelligent and creative, obsessively working out solutions.
”
”
Barry Blitt (Peculiar Questions and Practical Answers: A Little Book of Whimsy and Wisdom from the Files of the New York Public Library)
“
Work helped distract him from his morbid state of mind. The library wasn't his biggest project, but he was exhilarated by it. He approached it with a kind of freedom he had never experienced before. He believed that its design could fuse everything he had learned and loved in the visual world into a monument to things he valued most: history, books, philosophy, design, aspiration, creativity.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Library Book)
“
Always be reading. Go to the library. There's magic in being surrounded by books. Get lost in the stacks. Read bibliographies. It's not the book you start with, it's the book that book leads you to.
”
”
Austin Kleon (Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative)
“
Think creatively and unconventionally. Think critically and analytically. Think collaboratively and compassionately. Think positively and optimistically. The world awaits your ideas instantly.
”
”
Gift Gugu Mona (365 Motivational Life Lessons)
“
Use your words in creative and imaginative ways. Let them create gracious and prosperous pathways.
”
”
Gift Gugu Mona (365 Motivational Life Lessons)