Odell Quotes

Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.

She hated her job the same way I hated my jobs because she knew she was worth more, but she also hated herself so there wasn't much point in trying to do better.

A man spends his whole life trying to prove his worth to others. A woman spends her life trying to prove her worth to herself.

More than anything, it was the blue dolphins that took me back home.

Below me Rontu was running along the cliffs barking at the screaming gulls. Pelicans were chattering as they finished the blue water. But suddenly I thought of Tutok, and the island seemed very quiet.

And though there’s a grain of truth in every rumor, I’ve found that the worst gossip usually starts with something harmless.

I will participate, but not as asked,

I suggest that we reimagine #FOMO as #NOMO, the necessity of missing out,

My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.

Extrapolating this into the realm of strangers, I worry that if we let our real-life interactions be corralled by our filter bubbles and branded identities, we are also running the risk of never being surprised, challenged, or changed—never seeing anything outside of ourselves, including our own privilege.

They were like English teachers who took the fun out of a perfectly good book by breaking it down into themes and sentence structures

When I look up, there are women as far as I can see, standing in the river one behind the other, generations going back to the beginning time, from the very womb of God.

I wanted to end it now, like a bad TV show turned off in the middle.

Sometiimes when you look at a person all you see is the tangle and you miss the weave

What does it mean to construct digital worlds while the actual world is crumbling before our eyes?

They were black like a lizard's and very large and, like the eyes of a lizard, could sometimes look sleepy.

It’s your life. Only you can choose what you make with it, whether it’s chicken salad or chicken shit.

The morning was fresh from the rain. The smell of the tide pools was strong. Sweet odors came from the wild grasses in the ravines and from the sand plants on the dunes. I sang as I went down the trail to the beach and along the beach to the sandspit. I felt that the day was an omen of good fortune. It was a good day to begin my new home.

:...For animals and birds are like people, too, though they do not talk the same or do the same things. Without them the earth would be an unhappy place.

A flapping tongue puts out the light of wisdom."~Polly Shine

Maybe "the point" isn't to live more, in the literal sense of a longer or more productive life, but rather, to be more alive in any given moment—a movement outward and across, rather than shooting forward on a narrow, lonely track.

We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to “want what we want to want.” Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self.

Woman is the way God says yes in this here world. He put the promise on us. The woman carries ‘In the beginning’ in her body. And every month God will use your blood to wash the moon so the beginning time can begin again. When you get to be a woman you got to carry the promise with respect, and honor all the mothers who passed it down to us.

In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing.

For a long time I called it Otter as I had called Rontu, Dog. Then I decided to give the otter a name. The name was Mon-a-nee, which means Little Boy with Large Eyes.

I told her once I wasn't good at anything. She ran her thumb over my lips raw from kissing her and said survival was a talent.

A cool breeze lifted the hem of my nightgown. The birds began to chirp and sing and the first sparks of sunlight brought the dew drops to life.... When my fingers touched the back door, something inside me shifted - I could actually feel it. I knew Mrs. Odell was right. I felt the flutter of a page turn deep within me as a chapter in my Life Book came to a close.

Ultimately, I argue for a view of the self and of identity that is the opposite of the personal brand: an unstable, shapeshifting thing determined by interactions with others and with different kinds of places.

I've decided that the worst part of loneliness isn't being alone. It's being forgotten.

I don't like phones. You can't be sure people are paying attention to you when you're talking to them.

After that summer, after being friends with Won-a-nee and her young, I never killed another otter. I had an otter cape for my shoulders, which I used until it wore out, but never again did I make a new one. Nor did I ever kill another cormorant for its beautiful feathers, though they have long, think necks and make ugly sounds when they talk to each other. Nor did I kill seals for their sinews, using instead kelp to bind the things that needed it. Nor did I kill another wild dog, nor did I try to speak another sea elephant. Ulape would have laughed at me, and other would have laughed, too -- my father most of all. Yet this is the way I felt about the animals who had become my friends and those who were not, bu in time could be. If Ulape and my father had come back and laughed, and all the other had come back and laughed, still I would have felt the same way, for animals and birds are like people, too, though they do no talk the same or do the same things. Without them the earth would be an unhappy place.

It is with acts of attention that we decide who to hear, who to see, and who in our world has agency. In this way, attention forms the ground not just for love, but for ethics.

That place I'm talking about ain't nothing but a bloody slit in this world of His. But everybody wants to rule over it. It ain't for the white man to rule. Ain't for any man to rule.

To do nothing is to hold yourself still so that you can perceive what is actually there. As Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who records natural soundscapes, put it: “Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.

anyone who believed she had gotten to where she was by sleeping with her boss “is still living in the era when a woman could only make it to the top by pleasing a man.

Context is what appears when you hold your attention open for long enough; the longer you hold it, the more context appears.

Granada had never been on the water before and she marveled at how the creek was a living thing with a will of its own, like an untamed horse challenging her to ride upon its back.

a league,

When you quilting up a life, you sometimes got to start with any piece you can get your hands on.

Creation is filled with soul-sick folks, colored and white, never knowing where they belong. They tangle everybody else up in their grief.

Hun smilte til fru Odell og sa: Vi får gjøre som Scarlett O'Hara, og ikke bekymre oss for morgendagen før den er her.

Many of our tribe went to the cliff each night to count the number killed during the day. They counted the dead otter and thought of the beads and other things that each pelt meant. But I never went to the cove and whenever I saw the hunters with their long spears skimming over the water, I was angry, for these animals were my friends. It was fun to see them playing or sunning themselves among the kelp. It more fun than the thought of beads to wear around my neck.

You're not special for the pain you've suffered; you're special for what you've done to overcome that pain.

Books were the one way Clara could wander, so she was more than happy to spend her morning with the Black Knight and legendary outlaws of the forest.

Put your nose in a book. That’s the best thing for you.

You have in your hand the Pearl of the Universe. The Paragon of Pearls. The great Pearl of Heaven!

Though Anna’s judgments of others were ruthless, she was probably hardest on herself.

Matasaip who

You don’t have no idea who you are. And if you don’t know who you are,” Polly continued, “you can’t know nothing about where you beee-long.

No one had ever told her about the ingredients of life, only of biscuits.

Being a loner and being a loner were two separate things- Fireproof

Being alone could sometimes feel terribly empty...

I’ve never had any desire to be loved. I prefer being feared. It gets the same results but without any hugging.

My brother Ramo was only a little boy half my age, which was twelve. He was small for one who had lived so many suns and moons, but quick as a cricket.

Like most of my predecessors, I have hunted the unicorn chiefly in libraries, realizing the delightful absurdity of the task quite as fully as any one could point it out to me.

I’m suggesting that we protect our spaces and our time for non-instrumental, noncommercial activity and thought, for maintenance, for care, for conviviality. And I’m suggesting that we fiercely protect our human animality against all technologies that actively ignore and disdain the body, the bodies of other beings, and the body of the landscape that we inhabit.

Our idea of progress is so bound up with the idea of putting something new in the world that it can feel counterintuitive to equate progress with destruction, removal, and remediation.

Everyone in our tribe had two names, the real one which was secret and was seldom used, and one which was common, for if people use your secret name it becomes worn out and loses its magic.

Playlist 1. Wild Honey - U2 2. Like Real People Do - Hozier 3. Colorblind - Counting Crows 4. Oh Darling - Gossling 5. Breathing Underwater - Metric 6. Let It Die - Foo Fighters 7. I’m Sorry - Imagine Dragons 8. Fools - Troye Sivan 9. Don’t Mess Me Around - Clare Maguire 10. Heal - Tom Odell 11. Unbreakable - Jamie Scott 12. I’m The Man Who Loves You - Wilco 13. Creep - Radiohead

One thing I have learned about attention is that certain forms of it are contagious. When you spend enough time with someone who pays close attention to something (if you were hanging out with me, it would be birds), you inevitably start to pay attention to some of the same things. I’ve also learned that patterns of attention—what we choose to notice and what we do not—are how we render reality for ourselves, and thus have a direct bearing on what we feel is possible at any given time. These aspects, taken together, suggest to me the revolutionary potential of taking back our attention. To capitalist logic, which thrives on myopia and dissatisfaction, there may indeed be something dangerous about something as pedestrian as doing nothing: escaping laterally toward each other, we might just find that everything we wanted is already here.

Maggie felt sorry for her, a woman surrounded by beautiful expensive things, all of them by authentic designers, genuine gold-trims, the best-quality fabrics and woods, rare collector accessories of porcelain and ceramic—nothing artificial except her personality. Maggie

Flat outstretched upon a mound Of earth I lie; I press my ear Against its surface and I hear Far off and deep, the measured sound Of heart that beats within the ground. And with it pounds in harmony The swift, familiar heart in me. They pulse as one, together swell, Together fall; I cannot tell My sound from earth's, for I am part Of rhythmic, universal heart.

To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, a frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the strength of one’s career, and individual entrepreneurship. It means embracing and trying to inhabit somewhat fuzzier or blobbier ideas: of maintenance as productivity, of the importance of nonverbal communication, and of the mere experience of life as the highest goal. It means recognizing and celebrating a form of the self that changes over time, exceeds algorithmic description, and whose identity doesn’t always stop at the boundary of the individual.

I am not anti-technology. After all, there are forms of technology—from tools that let us observe the natural world to decentralized, noncommercial social networks—that might situate us more fully in the present. Rather, I am opposed to the way that corporate platforms buy and sell our attention, as well as to designs and uses of technology that enshrine a narrow definition of productivity and ignore the local, the carnal, and the poetic. I am concerned about the effects of current social media on expression—including the right not to express oneself—and its deliberately addictive features. But the villain here is not necessarily the Internet, or even the idea of social media; it is the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction. It is furthermore the cult of individuality and personal branding that grow out of such platforms and affect the way we think about our offline selves and the places where we actually live.

Just remember this, girl, the water you hate is the water that's going to drown you.

Calming ain't curing, is it, girl?" the woman asked aloud. "Keeping you hushed might keep me out of jail, but sure as the world, calming ain't curing.

Could be worse, I guess. Could have a husband.

Maybe over time I'll forget the feel and smell and sound of him, the same way I am starting to forget Mom, but I'll never be able to forget that he should've been here.

Before it’s in fashion, it’s in Vogue.

When you got a question,” Polly said before Granada could ask, “first be silent. Look around you. Let creation speak the truth to you.” She

I wanna learn to love, but all my tears have been used up, on another love.

Capitalism is based on the concept that in order for someone to succeed, someone else has to suffer.

Trust was such a delicate thing, so fragile, not easily earned and harder to repair.

Just the usual. Aspirin, vitamin C, a shot of whiskey.” That last was my great aunt Maureen’s remedy for whatever ailed you. She usually came down with “something” once a week.

bitchy new ice queen

She can’t come across as snooty or aloof or sad or dour. She must be simultaneously chic, accessible, natural, friendly, and warm.

We have to figure out a way to keep moving forward.

Her determination lit up like a match.

Do you need a therapist, or do you need a union?

Realities are, after all, inhabitable. If we can render a new reality together—with attention—perhaps we can meet each other there.

I looked over at my neighbor, the song sparrow, and thought about how just a few years ago, I wouldn’t have known its name, might not have even known it was a sparrow, might not have even seen it at all. How lonely that world seemed in comparison to this one! But the sparrow and I were no longer strangers. It was no stretch of the imagination, nor even of science, to think that we were related. We were both from the same place (Earth), made of the same stuff. And most important, we were both alive.

It was a hard task catching fish every day, especially if the wind was blowing and the waves were high. Once when I could catch only two and dropped them into the pool, Mon-a-nee ate them quickly and waited for more. When he found that was all I had he swam around in circles, looking at me reproachfully. The

I grew up thinking that parks were somehow just “leftover” spaces, but I’ve learned that the story of any park or preserve is absolutely one of “redemption preserv[ing] itself in a small crack in the continuum of catastrophe.

However you refer to it, what this practice has in common with Deep Listening is that observing birds requires you quite literally to do nothing. Bird-watching is the opposite of looking something up online. You can’t really look for birds; you can’t make a bird come out and identify itself to you. The most you can do is walk quietly and wait until you hear something, and then stand motionless under a tree, using your animal senses to figure out where and what it is.

All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo Big Nate series by Lincoln Peirce The Black Cauldron (The Chronicles of Prydain) by Lloyd Alexander The Book Thief  by Markus Zusak Brian’s Hunt by Gary Paulsen Brian’s Winter by Gary Paulsen Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson Bud, Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis The Call of the Wild by Jack London The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White The Chronicles of Narnia series by C. S. Lewis Diary of a Wimpy Kid series by Jeff Kinney Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury The Giver by Lois Lowry Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling Hatchet by Gary Paulsen The High King (The Chronicles of Prydain) by Lloyd Alexander The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien Holes by Louis Sachar The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins I Am LeBron James by Grace Norwich I Am Stephen Curry by Jon Fishman Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell Johnny Tremain by Esther Hoskins Forbes Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson LeBron’s Dream Team: How Five Friends Made History by LeBron James and Buzz Bissinger The Lightning Thief  (Percy Jackson and the Olympians) by Rick Riordan A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle Number the Stars by Lois Lowry The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton The River by Gary Paulsen The Sailor Dog by Margaret Wise Brown Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachlan Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor “A Sound of Thunder” by Ray Bradbury Star Wars Expanded Universe novels (written by many authors) Star Wars series (written by many authors) The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann D. Wyss Tales from a Not-So-Graceful Ice Princess (Dork Diaries) by Rachel Renée Russell Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt Under the Blood-Red Sun by Graham Salisbury The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

This book is about how to hold open that place in the sun. It is a field guide to doing nothing as an act of political resistance to the attention economy, with all the stubbornness of a Chinese “nail house” blocking a major highway. I want this not only for artists and writers, but for any person who perceives life to be more than an instrument and therefore something that cannot be optimized. A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram act like dams that capitalize on our natural interest in others and an ageless need for community, hijacking and frustrating our most innate desires, and profiting from them. Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive. —

Removal and contemplation were necessary to be able to see what was happening, but that same contemplation would always bring one back around to their responsibility to and in the world. For Merton, there was no question of whether or not to participate, only how: If I had no choice about the age in which I was to live, I nevertheless have a choice about the attitude I take and about the way and the extent of my participation in its living ongoing events. To choose the world is… an acceptance of a task and a vocation in the world, in history and in time. In my time, which is the present.

In my opinion, this kind of hyper-accelerated expression on social media is not exactly helpful (not to mention the huge amount of value it produces for Facebook). It’s not a form of communication driven by reflection and reason, but rather a reaction driven by fear and anger. Obviously these feelings are warranted, but their expression on social media so often feels like firecrackers setting off other firecrackers in a very small room that soon gets filled with smoke. Our aimless and desperate expressions on these platforms don’t do much for us, but they are hugely lucrative for advertisers and social media companies, since what drives the machine is not the content of information but the rate of engagement.

if you’re talking about a love of clothing, a love of expression, a love of color, a love of culture, a love of how putting things on can make women feel about themselves and their place in the world, those are measures of success that no one woman is ever going to be able to stop someone from feeling.

What amazed and humbled me about bird-watching was the way it changed the granularity of my perception, which had been pretty “low-res.” At first, I just noticed birdsong more. Of course it had been there all along, but now that I was paying attention to it, I realized that it was almost everywhere, all day, all the time. And then, one by one, I started learning each song and associating it with a bird, so that now when I walk into the Rose Garden, I inadvertently acknowledge them in my head as though they were people: “Hi, raven, robin, song sparrow, chickadee, goldfinch, towhee, hawk, nuthatch…” and so on.

That’s why, when I worry about the estuary’s diversity, I am also worrying about my own diversity—about having the best, most alive parts of myself paved over by a ruthless logic of use. When I worry about the birds, I am also worrying about watching all my possible selves go extinct. And when I worry that no one will see the value of these murky waters, it is also a worry that I will be stripped of my own unusable parts, my own mysteries, and my own depths.

Why is it that the modern idea of productivity is so often a frame for what is actually the destruction of the natural productivity of an ecosystem? This sounds a lot like the paradox in Zhuang Zhou’s story, which more than anything is a joke about how narrow the concept of “usefulness” is. When the tree appears to the carpenter in his dream, it’s essentially asking him: Useful for what? Indeed, this is the same question I have when I give myself enough time to step back from the capitalist logic of how we currently understand productivity and success. Productivity that produces what? Successful in what way, and for whom? The happiest, most fulfilled moments of my life have been when I was completely aware of being alive, with all the hope, pain, and sorrow that that entails for any mortal being. In those moments, the idea of success as a teleological goal would have made no sense; the moments were ends in themselves, not steps on a ladder. I think people in Zhuang Zhou’s time knew the same feeling.

Slowly. Very slowly, sliding my nails along the entire length of the hair. Ah. The satisfactions were immense, incalculable. All that powder flying off of me! The storms, the blizzards, the whirlwinds of whiteness! It was no easy job, let me tell you, but little by little every trace of the O’Dell’s would disappear. The do would be undone, and by the time the last bell rang and the teacher sent us home, my scalp would be tingling with happiness. It was as good as sex, mon vieux, as good as all the drugs and drink I ever poured into my system. Five years old, and every day another orgy of self-repair. No wonder I didn’t pay attention at school. I was too busy feeling myself up, too busy doing the O’Dell’s diddle.

Sometimes you got to lie on the outside to keep your voice loud on the inside. We don’t owe the master the truth. He owes us. Nothing comes from the master. He is the thief in the night. He steals it all. And every time we have to say ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir,’ he steals some more. But we can survive it, if we stay loud in here,” she said, throwing a fist hard against her breast.

It shames me to admit that in the white-defined society in which I was raised, blacks were considered merely background. This was worse than physical segregation. This was psychological segregation. It wasn't that we were taught not to associate with blacks: close association was unavoidable. Instead, we were taught to see half the population not as individuals but as functionaries - maids, yardmen, etc.

I doubt we we'll find anything," he told Jason, though he was watching O'Dell's reaction out of the corner of his eye. "but you can never let the dog know. She takes her leads from her handler." Even as he said this, Grace looked back at him. "As far as she's concerned," he continued in a casual tone, purposely not using her name, " I need to relay that I'm just as excited as she is. And that this search is going to be more interesting that piss on a fence post.

On a collective level, the stakes are higher. We know that we live in complex times that demand complex thoughts and conversations—and those, in turn, demand the very time and space that is nowhere to be found. The convenience of limitless connectivity has neatly paved over the nuances of in-person conversation, cutting away so much information and context in the process. In an endless cycle where communication is stunted and time is money, there are few moments to slip away and fewer ways to find each other. Given how poorly art survives in a system that only values the bottom line, the stakes are cultural as well. What the tastes of neoliberal techno manifest–destiny and the culture of Trump have in common is impatience with anything nuanced, poetic, or less-than-obvious.

That campaign was about a demarcation of time. So it’s interesting, and certainly troubling, to understand the decline in labor unions in the last several decades alongside a similar decline in the demarcation of public space. True public spaces, the most obvious examples being parks and libraries, are places for—and thus the spatial underpinnings of—“what we will.” A public, noncommercial space demands nothing from you in order for you to enter, nor for you to stay; the most obvious difference between public space and other spaces is that you don’t have to buy anything, or pretend to want to buy something, to be there.

She’s wearing the dreamy expression peculiar to the very old and the very young, where they seem fascinated by something everyone else takes for granted. People find the phenomenon adorable in babies. It means they’re inquisitive and intrigued by objects in their new world. In old people they usually chalk it up to senility, but I don’t think that’s the case. For both, it’s the ability to see things in their purest sense. All the knowledge that comes from experience doesn’t exist for a child and doesn’t matter anymore to an old lady. With a life completely in front of you or a life completely behind you, the world looks basically the same. She

I REMEMBER the day the Aleut ship came to our island. At first it seemed like a small shell afloat on the sea. Then it grew larger and was a gull with folded wings. At last in the rising sun it became what it really was—a red ship with two red sails. My brother and I had gone to the head of a canyon that winds down to a little harbor which is called Coral Cove. We had gone to gather roots that grow there in the spring. My brother Ramo was only a little boy half my age, which was twelve. He was small for one who had lived so many suns and moons, but quick as a cricket. Also foolish as a cricket when he was excited. For this reason and because I wanted him to help me gather roots and not go running off, I said nothing about the shell I saw or the gull with folded wings. I went on digging in the brush with my pointed stick as though nothing at all were happening on the sea. Even when I knew for sure that the gull was a ship with two red sails. But Ramo’s eyes missed little in the world. They were black like a lizard’s and very large and, like the eyes of a lizard, could sometimes look sleepy. This was the time when they saw the most. This was the way they looked now. They were half-closed, like those of a lizard lying on a rock about to flick out its tongue to catch a fly. “The sea is smooth,” Ramo said. “It is a flat stone without any scratches.” My brother liked to pretend that one thing was another. “The sea is not a stone without scratches,” I said. “It is water and no waves.” “To me it is a blue stone,” he said. “And far away on the edge of it is a small cloud which sits on the stone.” “Clouds do not sit on stones. On blue ones or black ones or any kind of stones.” “This one does.” “Not on the sea,” I said. “Dolphins sit there, and gulls, and cormorants, and otter, and whales too, but not clouds.” “It is a whale, maybe.” Ramo was standing on one foot and then the other, watching the ship coming, which he did not know was a ship because he had never seen one. I had never seen one either, but I knew how they looked because I had been told. “While you gaze at the sea,” I said, “I dig roots. And it is I who will eat them and you who will not.” Ramo began to punch at the earth with his stick, but as the ship came closer, its sails showing red through the morning mist, he kept watching it, acting all the time as if he were not. “Have you ever seen a red whale?” he asked. “Yes,” I said, though I never had. “Those I have seen are gray.” “You are very young and have not seen everything that swims in the world.” Ramo picked up a root and was about to drop it into the basket. Suddenly his mouth opened wide and then closed again. “A canoe!” he cried. “A great one, bigger than all of our canoes together. And red!” A canoe or a ship, it did not matter to Ramo. In the very next breath he tossed the root in the air and was gone, crashing through the brush, shouting as he went. I kept on gathering roots, but my hands trembled as I dug in the earth, for I was more excited than my brother. I knew that it was a ship there on the