Im wesentlichen eigene Gedanken, manchmal auch Zitate, aber dasgeschieht ganz selten

Hans Bethe, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967, remarked: “I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann’s does not indicate a species superior to that of man.”

Stallings said, “Does Emily’s clarity betray that element of the epic register that Matthew Arnold calls ‘nobility’? Some critics think a certain grandeur is missing. But every translation is a compromise, even a great one.”

"This," says Aristotle, "is the essence of the plot; the rest isepisode."

The critic Guy Davenport, in a pan of Lattimore, wrote that translation is a game of two languages, and that “the translator is in constant danger of inventing a third that lies between.”

I just try to catch ideas—andsometimes I fall in love with one and then I know what I want to do. Ithas nothing to do with money; just with translating that idea.

Softer than the flower where kindness is concerned,Stronger than the thunder where principles are at stake.VEDIC DESCRIPTION OF THE ENLIGHTENED

You become familiar with the process of catching an idea andtranslating that idea. You understand the tools and the lighting. Youunderstand the whole process—you’ve been through it before.

It’s interesting to seehow these unrelated things live together. And it gets your mindworking. How do these things relate when they seem so far apart? Itconjures up a third thing that almost unifies those first two. It’s astruggle to see how this unity in the midst of diversity could go towork.The ocean is the unity and these things float on it.

If you don’t have a setup, there are many times when you get theinspiration, the idea, but you have no tools, no place to put ittogether. And the idea just sits there and festers. Over time, it will goaway. You didn’t fulfill it—and that’s just a heartache.

Because these religions are old, though, and they’vebeen fiddled with, possibly, I feel some of the original keys from themasters have been lost.

You’ve got to be able to catch ideas.

The idea is the whole thing. If you stay true to the idea, it tells youeverything you need to know, really. You just keep working to make itlook like that idea looked, feel like it felt, sound like it sounded, andbe the way it was. And it’s weird, because when you veer off, yousort of know it. You know when you’re doing something that is notcorrect because it feels incorrect. It says, “No, no; this isn’t like theidea said it was.” And when you’re getting into it the correct way, itfeels correct. It’s an intuition: You feel-think your way through. Youstart one place, and as you go, it gets more and more finely tuned.But all along it’s the idea talking. At some point, it feels correct toyou. And you hope that it feels somewhat correct to others.

An idea is a thought. It’s a thought that holds more than you think itdoes when you receive it. But in that first moment there is a spark. Ina comic strip, if someone gets an idea, a lightbulb goes on. Ithappens in an instant, just as in life.It would be great if the entire film came all at once. But it comes,for me, in fragments. That first fragment is like the Rosetta Stone. It’sthe piece of the puzzle that indicates the rest. It’s a hopeful puzzlepiece.

Ideas are like fish.If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water.But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure.They’rehuge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.I look for a certain kind of fish that is important to me, one that cantranslate to cinema. But there are all kinds of fish swimming downthere. There are fish for business, fish for sports.There are fish foreverything.

LYNCH: Well, for me, ideas—even a fragment—convey everything. In a spark you see images, youhear sounds, you feel a mood. And it becomescomplete, even if it is a fragment. The original ideacomes with a lot of power, and you have to keepchecking back all the way through the process tosee if you are being true to it.

LYNCH: Well, I could say that Dino De Laurentiis cutmy salary and cut the budget, and then gave mefinal cut. So he was into cutting! (

I haven’t caughtthe next idea, either through a book or from theocean of ideas.

LYNCH: No. The whole thing has to make sense toyou, and it has to feel correct. And—but again, it’sbased on these ideas that have been forming andarranging and finally showing you what it is. Andit’s just focusing on those through the process.And if it makes sense, no matter how abstract asense, again it goes back to intuition rather thanjust pure intellect, and something that can be soeasily translated into words by, you know,everyone. Those are beautiful things to me,abstractions. And life is filled with them, andcinema can do abstractions.

LYNCH: No. I think a film is digested ideas andprocesses. If you take from things that have gonethrough that process, you’re further away from thesource. Ideas are the most important things. Andthey seem to be lying there in an ocean andavailable. So if you could go in and get your ownidea—now, it may have similarities to many thingsthat have gone before, but you feel it’s yours, andyou fall in love with it. And that’s a very goodfeeling.

LYNCH: I know we were doing that, but lookingback, it’s a magical process because you can’t tellwhere ideas come from, and it seems like it’s justboth of us focusing on something. And it was acouple of ideas that were fragments, and thosefragments focus you. And it seems that theyrelease a little lock on a door and the door opensand more fragments start coming in—drawn by thefirst fragments. It’s strange, because if any of youhave ever written anything, you know that one dayit’s not there and then a month later or two monthslater it’s there. And it’s two people tuning into thesame place, I think.

LYNCH: Well, I think it’s everyone’s experience thatno matter what, things come to us in fragments.

nobody ever said that reading was easy reading is is 02:25:41 very hard if it weren't hard it wouldn't be worth doing correct and the better the work that you're reading the harder the work is and therefore the more satisfying

this little discussion we're having reminds me of a lecture I once gave many years ago shortly after how to read a book was first published which which I said that I thought that solitary 02:17:34 reading was almost as much advice as solitary drinking

Mehlhorn is determinedly of the view that people can only be motivated by fear: “You cannot get people to vote by getting them to believe that voting and participating will materially improve their lives,” he told Ryan Grim of The Intercept. “What you can get people to get really excited about is: ‘If you participate in politics, you might be able to prevent something really bad from happening to you.’ ”

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance.

All Western philosophy, Whitehead once remarked, is but "a footnote to Plato";and the later Greeks themselves had a saying: "Everywhere Igo in my head, I meet Plato coming back."

"Poetry is more philosophical than history," wrote Aristotle.By this he meant that poetry is more general, more universal.

The ability toretain the child's view of the world, with at the same time amature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremelyrare-and a person who has these qualities is likely to be ableto contribute something really important to our thinking.

"verbalism" is the besetting sin of those who fail to read analytically.

Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature.

As Pascal observed three hundred years ago, "When we read too fast or too slowly, we under­stand nothing."

The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato . I do not mean thesystematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extractedfrom his writings . I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered throughthem . His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience ata great period of civilization, h is inheritance of an intellectual traditionnot yet stiffened by excessive systematization, have made h is writings t aninexhaustible mine of suggestion

Zeynep Tufekci recently wrote in the Times. “YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.”

“Even the creators don’t always understand why it recommends one video instead of another,” says Guillaume Chaslot, an ex-YouTube engineer who worked on the site’s algorithm.

“Our research suggests that Palawa oral traditions accurately recall the flooding of the land bridge between Tasmania and the mainland – showing that oral traditions can be passed down more than 400 successive generations while maintaining historical accuracy.”

Merchants and traders have a waste book (Sudelbuch, Klitterbuch in GermanI believe) in which they enter daily everything they purchase and sell,messily, without order. From this, it is transferred to their journal, whereeverything appears more systematic, and finally to a ledger, in double entryafter the Italian manner of bookkeeping, where one settles accounts witheach man, once as debtor and then as creditor. This deserves to be imitatedby scholars. First it should be entered in a book in which I record everythingas I see it or as it is given to me in my thoughts; then it may be enteredin another book in which the material is more separated and ordered, andthe ledger might then contain, in an ordered expression, the connectionsand explanations of the material that flow from it. [46]

We should only write on one side of these papers so that in searching through them, we do not have to take out a paper in order to read it. This doubles the space, but not entirely (since we would not write on both sides of all the slips). This consideration is not unimportant as the arrangement of boxes can, after some decades, become so large that it cannot be easily be used from one’s chair. In order to counteract this tendency, I recommend taking normal paper and not card stock.

We all threw a lot away. In general I’m good at avoiding or throwing away paper. But I cannot throw away books, so I have rather a lot of them piled on the shelves.

Inspired by Apple layout.

As Catherine Cronin (2017, p. 2) has explained,“Open educational practices (OEP) is a broad descriptor ofpractices that include the creation, use, and reuse of openeducational resources (OER) as well as open pedagogies andopen sharing of teaching practices.”

As late as 1884 the four hundred American institutions of higher education had about twenty full-time teachers of history.”

Diller says that she always let the audience do the editing of her material for her. If people didn't laugh, or get it right away, the joke didn't survive. "You never blame the audience," she says. Thus, her advice to aspiring comics: "Go out and try it, and if you find out from the audience that you're not funny, quit."

"The [joke] file is like a tree," says Diller. "Leaves drop off, and new leaves are added—the new stuff pushes out the old." Along with this cache—Diller refers to it as "my life in one-liners"

There was a time, she once quipped, when she had worked for an editor "who was so mean that he used to eat thumbtacks for breakfast with skimmed water."

“I think the most important thing I can say about Phyllis Diller,” says Bowers, “is that she was like Betty Friedan and the Feminine Mystique. Just like Friedan, Phyllis Diller chronicled the daily lives of woman. But she did it with laughs.”

“The file is like a tree,” Diller told the magazine’s Owen Edwards in 2007. “Leaves drop off, and new leaves are added—the new stuff pushes out the old.”

Wer Warburgs Zettelkasten folgt, folgt ihm bei seinenGedankengängen; vom Bankenwesen in Florenz, der mit-telalterlichen Handelsgesellschaft, dem Herausbilden vonIndividualität, der rastlosen Berufsarbeit der Calvinistenund der reformierten Form der Askese bis zu Warburgseigener Herkunft aus alter jüdischer Bankiersfamilie.378Der Zettelkasten ist Warburgs Ariadnefaden durch seinelabyrinthische Bibliothek wie sein labyrinthisches Denken:vom Werwolf zur Geschichtsauffassung. Ein Gedanke,eine Idee oder ein neuer Begriff entstehen nicht in einergeradlinigen Progression, sondern in einem Prozess desHin- und Herbewegens von Idee-Einheiten und Querver-weisen, der so lange andauert, bis sich neue Schnittstel-len und Knotenpunkte gebildet haben.

DILLER: And, you know, of course they always say to Californians that we don't have seasons. Of course, that is not true. We have fire, flood, mud and drought.

Light travels faster than sound. That's why some people seem bright until they speak.

HEIDI ROTBART: She would write a joke on a piece of paper, and her assistants would type them up on 3-by-5 cards and then place them in the joke file.

The joke file is a snapshot of American history.”

“I really admired that she had everything so organized on catalog cards,” she said.

“Government is not the solution to our problem; government is theproblem.” So declared Ronald Reagan as he launched hisadministration in January 1981,

When I was learning to write in my teens, it seemed to me that paper was a prison. Four walls, right? And the ideas were constantly trying to escape. What is a parenthesis but an idea trying to escape? What is a footnote but an idea that tried -- that jumped off the cliff? Because paper enforces single sequence -- and there’s no room for digression -- it imposes a particular kind of order in the very nature of the structure.-- Ted Nelson, demonstration of Xanadu space

Adam Smith stated the case long ago: "A man withoutthe proper use of the intellectual faculties of a man, is, ifpossible, more contemptible than even a coward, and seemsto be mutilated and deformed in a still more essential part ofthe character of human nature."

Undoubtedly the first task of the statesman in such countriesis to raise the standard of living to such a point that thepeople may be freed from economic slavery and given thetime to get the education appropriate to free men.

If leisure and political power requirethis education, everybody in America now requires it, andeverybody where democracy and industrialization penetratewill ultimately require it. If the people are not capable ofacquiring this education, they should be deprived of politicalpower and probably of leisure. Their uneducated politicalpower is dangerous, and their uneducated leisure is degrad-ing and will be dangerous. If the people are incapable ofachieving the education that responsible democratic citizen-ship demands, then democracy is doomed, Aristotle rightlycondemned the mass of mankind to natural slavery, and thesooner we set about reversing the trend toward democracythe better it will be for the world.

Sir RichardLivingstone said: "We are tied down, all our days and forthe greater part of our days, to the commonplace. That iswhere contact with great thinkers, great literature helps.

Notewise, whenever I read a passage that moves me, I transcribe it in my diary, hoping my fingers might learn what excellence feels like.

Upton Sinclair ran for Governor of California in the 1930s, and the coverage he received from newspapers was unsympathetic. Yet, in 1934 some California papers published installments from his forthcoming book about the ill-fated campaign titled “I, Candidate for Governor, and How I Got Licked”. Emphasis added to excerpts by QI:[1] 1934 December 11, Oakland Tribune, I, Candidate for Governor and How I Got Licked by Upton Sinclair, Quote Page 19, Column 3, Oakland, California. (Newspapers_com) I used to say to our audiences: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

"If mathematics is the science of analogy, the study of patterns, then category theory is the study of patterns of mathematical thought."

I think mathematicians do math in part because we think it's beautiful."

In an article she wrote recently for Scientific American, Riehl quoted John Horton Conway, an esteemed English mathematician: "What's the ontology of mathematical things? There's no doubt that they do exist, but you can't poke and prod them except by thinking about them. It's quite astonishing and I still don't understand it, despite having been a mathematician all my life. How can things be there without actually being there?"

Reading backwards revitalizes a text, revealing its constructedness, its seams, edges, and working parts.

Books aren’t something one approves or disapproves of; they are to be understood, interpreted, learned from, shocked by, argued with and enjoyed. Moreover, the evolution of literature and the other arts, their constant renewal over the centuries, has always been fueled by what is now censoriously labeled “cultural appropriation” but which is more properly described as “influence,” “inspiration” or “homage.” Poets, painters, novelists and other artists all borrow, distort and transform. That’s their job; that’s what they do.

I regret that the ideal of a home or family library has pretty much vanished along with door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen and sets of the “Great Books of the Western World.”

You cannot hopeto bribe or twist,thank God! theBritish journalist.But, seeing whatthe man will dounbribed, there’sno occasion to.—Humbert Wolfe, epigram from The Uncelestial City (1930

“Its scale is prodigious,” David Butterfield, a senior lecturer in Classics at Cambridge, said in an email, adding that when the first publication appeared in 1900, “it did not go unnoticed that the word closing that installment was ‘absurdus.’”

But I would do less than justice to Mr. Adler's achieve-ment if I left the matter there. The Syntopicon is, in additionto all this, and in addition to being a monument to the indus-try, devotion, and intelligence of Mr. Adler and his staff, astep forward in the thought of the West. It indicates wherewe are: where the agreements and disagreements lie; wherethe problems are; where the work has to be done. It thushelps to keep us from wasting our time through misunder-standing and points to the issues that must be attacked.When the history of the intellectual life of this century iswritten, the Syntopicon will be regarded as one of the land-marks in it.

Both the cult of learning around Dante and the cult ofignorance around Newton are phenomena of the vicious spe-cialization of scholarship.

As ScottBuchanan has said, "Popular science has made every manhis own quack; he needs some of the doctor's medicine."

As Stringfellow Barr has said, the world israpidly dividing into technicians who cannot tell the differ-ence between a good poem and sentimental doggerel and "cul-tured" people who know nothing about electricity exceptthat you push a button when you want it. In a society thatis highly technological the sooner the citizens understandthe basic ideas of mathematics and natural science the better.

We lament the man who, properly desiring to wrestle atfirst hand with the problems that the great poets and philos-ophers have raised, yet contents himself with the "results"and "findings" of modern science.

When Hermann Hesse referredto the present as "the Age of the Digest," he did not intendto say anything complimentary.

democracyrequires liberal education for all.

He takes banal people and puts them into banal situations, but he has hope for them.

But Tolstoy himself said the point is to get the thing said and then, if he wasn’t sure he had said it, he would say it again and again.”

In a letter to the Times Book Review in November, 1971, Nabokov wrote, “I am aware that my former friend is in poor health but in the struggle between the dictates of compassion and those of personal honor the latter wins.”

Nabokov wrote his translation to inspire his reader to know the poem in Russian:It is hoped that my readers will be moved to learn Pushkin’s language and go through EO again without this crib. In art as in science there is no delight without the detail, and it is on details that I have tried to fix the reader’s attention. Let me repeat that unless these are thoroughly understood and remembered, all “general ideas” (so easily acquired, so profitably resold) must necessarily remain but worn passports allowing their bearers short cuts from one area of ignorance to another.

One of Dewey’s principal concerns was for the relationship between educationand democracy. He made the point that democracy is not just a form ofgovernment—it is, rather, ‘a mode of associated living, a conjoint communicated

Her motto was ‘never interrupt aconcentrating child’

Today, you either thrive on that word processor model or you don’t. I really don’t, which is why I’ve invested effort, as you have, in researching previous writing workflows, older than the all-conquering PC of the late 1980s and early 90s. At the same time, new writing tools are challenging the established Microsoft way, but in doing so are drawing attention to the fact that each app locks the user into a particular set of assumptions about the drafting and publishing process.

Donald Trump has Sonny Bono beat as a kind of used-car salesman.

I turn to Joan and say, “My word, Joan. I’m so impressed. Melissa knows Yiddish?” Joan goes, “No. She doesn’t know Yiddish and I don’t know Yiddish. But anybody who’s speaking to you in Yiddish is telling you a joke so you laugh at the end of it. I’ve taught her that much so nobody will think she’s stupid.” That was Joan in her 50s. She’s almost 80 now and she still treats her daughter the same way.

“And yeah, it goes on, and on, and on. And one day, we’re going to get a little intern who thinks they’re in show business and is going to sit and put each and every one of these cards onto a computer so that when I’m in England and I need a joke about doctors, I can just go into my computer and come up with a — oh, this is a tramp. This tramp donated all her organs for transplants, which should make the recipients happy because her body has never rejected anything. [LAUGHS]: So. But it just goes on, and on, and on. These are just jokes over the years, years, and years, and years of jokes. And when I die, I can sell this to some lucky, lucky comedian who will then, if they’re smart, have enough to keep them going for their whole life.”

In Carlin’s archives, by contrast, the jokes were “mainly scraps of paper organized into Ziploc baggies then put into a folder by topic.”

I would advise you to read with a pen in your hand, and enter in a little book short hints of what you find that is curious or that may be useful; for this will be the best method of imprinting such particulars in your memory, where they will be ready either for practice on some future occasion if they are matters of utility, or at least to adorn and improve your conversation if they are rather points of curiosity.

Several English renderings have been published over the years. The following excerpt is from “Xunzi: The Complete Text” within chapter 8 titled “The Achievements of the Ru”. The translator was Eric L. Hutton, and the publisher was Princeton University Press in 2014. Emphasis added to excerpts:[1]2014 Copyright, Xunzi: The Complete Text, Translated by Eric L. Hutton, Chapter 8: The Achievements of the Ru, Quote Page 64, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. (Verified with … Continue reading Not having heard of it is not as good as having heard of it. Having heard of it is not as good as having seen it. Having seen it is not as good as knowing it. Knowing it is not as good as putting it into practice. Learning arrives at putting it into practice and then stops . . .

The Zettelkasten method aims to help you forget.

“All of us are imperfect,” Professor Calkins said. “The last two or three years, what I’ve learned from the science of reading work has been transformational.”

circulation is the lifeblood of reading.

Jeff Zucker, the former NBC executive and now president of CNN, coined the phrase “trading analog dollars for digital pennies” in 2008.

‘The greatest pleasure,’ Rütiner wrote, ‘is to associate and converse with learned men.’

I am an academic, so a critic might say that intellectual masturbation is kind of my job description.

of course I had done a lot of thinking even before I ever used a ZK, but now I can record, retrieve, and elaborate these thoughts easily so that they accumulate over time to something bigger. Now, writing a paper or grant proposal often comes down to concatenating a bunch of notes.

The magic comes from the repetition of adding your thoughts to the notes you take and reviewing notes regularly.

But I wouldn't call them a ZK® (stealing Andy's shorthand!) but they were a box of notes (Zettelkasten?).

I get by when I work by accumulating notes—a bit about everything, ideas cap-tured on the fly, summaries of what I have read, references, quotations . . . Andwhen I want to start a project, I pull a packet of notes out of their pigeonhole anddeal them out like a deck of cards. This kind of operation, where chance plays arole, helps me revive my failing memory.16

system was described by Charles Darwin:I keep from thirty to forty large portfolios, in cabinets with labeled shelves, intowhich I can at once put a detached reference or memorandum. I have bought manybooks and at their ends I make an index of all the facts that concern my work.Before beginning on any subject I look to all the short indexes and make a generaland classified index, and by taking the one or more proper portfolios I have all theinformation collected during my life ready for use.13

In a note, he dryly remarks: “Appearanceof the card index and constitution of the human sciences: another invention the historianshave celebrated little”.7

BJ Fogg is one of the leading authorities on habit change.  In his best selling book Tiny Habits he says: “Celebration will one day be ranked alongside mindfulness and gratitude as daily practices that contribute most to our overall happiness and well-being. If you learn just one thing from my entire book, I hope it’s this: Celebrate your tiny successes. This one small shift in your life can have a massive impact even when you feel there is no way up or out of your situation. Celebration can be your lifeline.”

“Content is king, but context is God.”

“Find out who you are and do it on purpose” Dolly Parton

5. If you could magically make one change to all keyboards in the world, what would it be? "Eliminate the need for a keyboard. It’s really a pretty archaic means as an interface. The very origin of the QWERTY layout is inefficiency. It was designed so that the operator could not out-run the typewriter and cross up the type levers. How about an entry system that reads the mind. Voice is nearly there, but it’s hard to have a quiet environment."

we split the head from the hands, or isolate humane studies from practicallife, we unfortunately tend to suppose that a liberal cultural education is the rightof only an elite few—the heads. Don’t we all—and not just the socially advantaged“heads”—deserve an education that prioritizes human growth?

none of this means we should turn students and teachers intofunctionaries or serfs for, in Dewey’s words in Democracy and Education, a “feudaldogma of social predestination.”

. The problem arises when institutions and policymakers assume,following the logic of the industrial model, that our primary and overriding edu-cational aim is thus to train students to fit the specifications of this existing infra-structure.

The mission of K–12 and higher educationis, in Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s infamous words last year, “to develop humanresources to meet the state’s workforce needs.”

“A being of infinitescope,” she wrote, “must not be treated with an exclusive view to any one relation. . . . Give the soul free course. . . and the being will be fit for any and every relationto which it may be called.”1

Asking a computer to create a glossary for you doesn’t make you any smarter than having a book that comes with a glossary.

“From that time, now the native citizens and now the enemyhave triumphed ... up to the year of the siege of Mount Badon,when the last but certainly not the least slaughter of these lowlyscoundrels occurred, which, I know, makes 44 years and onemonth, and which was also the time of my birth.”

My magic trick (having faced a similar dilemma with many lovely notebooks over the years) is to turn to the first double page and write in large lettersDON'T BE AFRAID TO MAKE YOUR MARK UPON LIFE'S PAGE.And just like that the new notebook spell is broken and the pen is free to write again.

I somehow made myself write in it and started with a sentence that I think would make for an excellent essay title some day: "Cheap paper is the perfectionist's salvation."

’ve been studying notebooks for over a decade and I still haven’t landed on a perfect organization method. I have, however, found the perfect pen: uni-ball signo, .38mm. I discovered them while teaching in Korea in 2008 and haven’t looked back.

Write down all these slender ideas. It is surprising how often one sentence, jotted in a notebook, leads immediately to a second sentence. A plot can develop as you write notes. Close the notebook and think about it for a few days — and then presto! you’re ready to write a short story. — Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks

Let us take down one of those old notebooks which we have all, at one time or another, had a passion for beginning. Most of the pages are blank, it is true; but at the beginning we shall find a certain number very beautifully covered with a strikingly legible hand-writing. Here we have written down the names of great writers in their order of merit; here we have copied out fine passages from the classics; here are lists of books to be read; and here, most interesting of all, lists of books that have actually been read, as the reader testifies with some youthful vanity by a dash of red ink. —“Hours in a Library”

Even three or four words are often worth jotting down if they will evoke a thought, an idea or a mood. In the barren periods, one should browse through the notebooks. Some ideas may suddenly start to move. Two ideas may combine, perhaps because they were meant to combine in the first place. —Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction

I highly recommend notebooks for writers, a small one if one has to be out on a job all day, a larger one if one has the luxury of staying at home.

As they flit like so many little bees between Greek and Latin authors of every species, here noting down something to imitate, here culling some notable saying to put into practice in their behavior, there getting by heart some witty anecdote to relate among their friends, you would swear you were watching the Muses at graceful play in the lovely pastures of Mount Helicon, gathering flowers and marjoram to make well-woven garlands. —The Adages of Erasmus

The bee plunders the flowers here and there, but afterwards they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work that is all his own, to wit, his judgment — The Complete Essays of Michel de Montaigne

We also, I say, ought to copy these bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, for such things are better preserved if they are kept separate; then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us, – in other words, our natural gifts, – we should so blend those several flavours into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came. —Epistle LXXXIV

I'd been looking at it like a collection of knowledge. A collection that has no purpose apart from... being a collection. But Zettelkasten should be a place for creativity, playing with ideas with output as the goal (at least for me). It should be fun. And managing it definitely shouldn't take more time than using it for your purposes.

Coleridge, Melville, Twain, David Foster Wallace, and a host of others made marginalia into a form of literary expression.

Josh Sargent, a member of the Akwesasne Mohawk community in upstate New York, where Hoover researched the impact of industrial contamination in the St. Lawrence River for her dissertation, said she’s “a good person and always welcome here.” Debates about her identity seem to be taking place in the “bubble of academia,” he said, while the real challenges facing Native people are being overlooked. He said she’s doing important work, and her book, “The River Is in Us,” accurately depicted the environmental harm suffered by his community. “I hope people read it.”

scarequotes

Internet is for everyone, but it won't be unless WE make it so. Vint Cerf, 7. April 1999

Tyrion Lannister : A wise man once said a true history of the world is a history of great conversations in elegant rooms.

Sometimes you must surrender the idea of steering the story toward a predetermined structure and destination. We all know how to do the latter, so it feels secure.

Writing about science means humbling yourself about how little you know, and then writing the story in the authoritative voice of a tentative expert.

Roy Peter Clark, writing scholar and coach at The Poynter Institute, says, “Reports give readers information. Stories give readers experience.” I would add: An article is generic; a story is unique.