“What characteristics do I look for when hiring somebody? That's one of the questions I ask when interviewing. I want to know what kind of people they would hire.”
Thoughtful feeling
Thoughtful Quotes — page 166 of 303
“Music is so hard to talk about in many ways, It communicates beyond what our language can put across, and having to sit there and analyze it and talk about it is a struggle for me.”
“It's hard to do, but I think it's really important to go back and watch yourself.”
“The test of the moral quality of a civilization is its treatment of the weak and powerless.”
“There's been a thoughtfulness to everything I do. Even the stupidest things I do have some kind of point.”
“Our souls need time to think, dream, and reflect.”
“Auto da Fay reveals the trickles of a creative sensibility that later became a tide, but essentially, Weldon the writer emerges only at the very end of this volume, in conjunction with her finding and marrying her husband of 30 years, Ron Weldon. In this sense, it is half a memoir, the private background story to the public future. (...) The reader is forced to re-evaluate the spectacular weirdness of Weldon's fiction: having lived such a life any other kind would seem insipid.”
“Modern, not bottom-dwelling literature like a carp.”
“Every day I observe more and more the folly of judging of others by ourselves; and I have so much trouble with myself, and my own heart is in such constant agitation, that I am well content to let others pursue their own course, if they only allow me the same privilege.”
“My counsel is, to force nothing, and rather to trifle and sleep away all unproductive days and hours, than on such days to compose something that will afterwards give no pleasure.”
“One is never satisfied with a portrait of persons whom one knows. That is why I have always pitied portraitists. One demands so seldom of others the impossible, but demands just that of the portraitists.”
“Let me just acknowlege that the function of grammar is to make language as efficent and clear and transparent as possible. But if we’re all constantly correcting each other’s grammar and being really snotty about it, then people stop talking because they start to be petrified that they’re going to make some sort of terrible grammatical error and that’s precisely the opposite of what grammar is supposed to do, which is to facilitate clear communication.”
“In my books I might hold the mirror to my own face. If others would like to borrow the mirror, they're welcome. The books aren't there to accuse others - merely to raise issues and keep the debates alive.”
“People are felt rather than seen after the first few moments.”
“A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers.”
“I confess that I have not cleared a path through all seven hundred pages, I confess to having examined only bits and pieces, and yet I know what it is, with that bold and legitimate certainty with which we assert our knowledge of a city, without ever having been rewarded with the intimacy of all the many streets it includes.”
“Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.”
“The word NO, carries a lot more meaning when spoken by a parent who also knows how to say yes.”
“I find that when I do not think of myself I do not think at all.”
“The uttered part of a man's life, let us always repeat, bears to the unuttered, unconscious part a small unknown proportion. He himself never knows it, much less do others.”