Quotations Weblog

I don’t find this quote very helpful to me. Whenever a friend has been in trouble, I have thought of things to do and offered them. So many times I have received horrified responses. I remember when I had my wisdom teeth removed. I was starving, but no food sounded good to my sore mouth. Mike made me cream of tomato soup and it was the most delicious food I had tasted. I had never had tomato soup made with milk before. I thought it was a gift from heaven.

When Mike had his wisdom teeth out, I tried to reciprocate. I made him the cream of tomato soup and he didn’t want any of it. It wasn’t delicious to him and he was in too much pain to eat anything else. All he wanted was sympathy and a nap. I would have never thought that a simple hug and a “there, there” would have helped, but it did. He slept off the pain and ate the next day.

This sentiment should be tempered with the thought from George Bernard Shaw:

This entry from Ward Jenkins at the Ward-O-Matic has been rolling around in my head for a couple of weeks now. He describes his fanboy meeting with Frank and Ollie, two of the Nine Old Men from Disney.

• The Ward-O-Matic: Meeting Giants

Ward was a young animator-to-be and he was thrilled to meet the two of them. Ollie was sick, but Frank was able to give him a piece of advice:

When I saw this, I realized that this was incredibly good advice for writers as well as animators. I think I have the WRITE, WRITE, WRITE down pat. I just need to work on my observation and communication skills.

Sometimes I have an idea that I want to tell and the words won’t flow from my brain to my fingertips. Sometimes I feel like I am in a haze or fog and I can’t see the world around me because I am so wrapped up in my own thoughts. I feel like I should have those three sentences tattooed on my wrist so I will always remember them.

I guess the WRITE, WRITE, WRITE part will give me the practice that I need. I just need to remember to keep my eyes open and blow the haze around my head away.

Last Friday on Pick Me!, I reviewed Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow. It is an odd book that mixes the fantasy world and the real world in strange and mixed up combinations that end up mostly making sense. I really enjoyed reading the book and found one of the characters to be particularly scary.

You can purchase this book at Amazon or download it for free at Cory’s site. He has released under the Creative Commons Copyright, so downloading it is perfectly legal.

Here are the amazing quotes that I was able to cull from its pages:

Every now and then someone emails me to tell me that I’ve misspelled Stanislaw Lem’s name as “Stanislaw Lec”, or vice versa. While we did make this mistake long ago, our quotations are now correct, but the confusing thing is that they are two different people:

• Stanislaw Jerzy Lec (1909-1966) was a Polish poet and writer. He is best known for his book of aphorisms, Unkempt Thoughts.
• Stanislaw Lem (b. 1921) is a polish writer of science fiction, best known for Solaris.

Now that we’ve got that straightened out, continuing the my favorite quotations series, here are some of my favorite quotes from Stanislaw J. Lec.

• more Stanislaw J. Lec quotations
• biography and bibliography of Stanislaw J. Lec at Wikipedia

It is quotations like this one that have helped me live a better life. A few years ago, I started on a journey that has led me to Starling Fitness. I write every day about all the ways to take better care of yourself. I do it mostly because I am researching all of this for myself. Sharing it with the world is just what I do to keep myself focused.

I always kind of thought that I would be dead by now. My teen years were spent being a punk rocker in Salt Lake City. I lived SLC Punk. Now I’m surprised to find that I’m alive and healthy and strong. I’m not addicted to drugs. I’m not a burnout working at a job I hate. I don’t even have a mohawk or wear too much eyeliner. I was a poseur and I’m glad to find out that it means that I get to live longer than I expected. Yeah!