“People don't listen to understand. They listen to reply. The collective monologue is everyone talking and no one listening.”
Thoughtful feeling
Thoughtful Quotes — page 88 of 303
“But there's one thing I'm sure about. An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this.”
“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
“The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.”
“The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them - words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out.”
“When you're in a young band for the first time, geographically you're in the same place and you tend to go out and socialize. You play more shows, you spend more time together. You're a unit. As you grow older, inevitably you develop a life outside the band. I think it would be tragic if you didn't.”
“Balancing your budget is like protecting your virtue. You have to learn when to say no.”
“To patronize the faculty of taste is to patronize oneself. For taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response.”
“Manners are the shadows of virtues; the momentary display of those qualities which our fellow creatures love, and respect.”
“Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.”
“If you find the mirror of the heart dull, the rust has not been cleared from its face.”
“Be occupied, then, with what you really value and let the thief take something else.”
“Am I saying this because I want to prove how smart I am or am I saying this because it needs to be said?”
“But learn this custom from the flower: silence your tongue.”
“Since when was an emotional argument won by logic?”
“He should have known better because, early in his learnings under his brother Mahmoud, he had discovered that long human words (the longer the better) were easy, unmistakable, and rarely changed their meanings, but short words were slippery, unpredictable changing their meanings without any pattern. Or so he seemed to grok. Short human words were never like a short Martian word - such as grok which forever meant exactly the same thing. Short human words were like trying to lift water with a knife. And this had been a very short word.”
“In a dilemma, it is helpful to change any variable, then reexamine the problem.”
“It's like this, by not giving my album a classic rating, you diminish your magazine's credibility. And that's real.”
“Or you'd just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them. I mean you'd be different in some way—I can't explain what I mean. And even if I could, I'm not sure I'd feel like it.”
“He shook my hand and said goodbye with a sentence that might have been either good advice or a threat: "Take good care of yourself.”