Wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind.
I'm insatiably curious about human nature. I feel very lucky that as a writer I get to learn so much about it just to do my job right.
Love is essential, gregariousness is optional.
Solve problems, make art, think deeply.
The glory of the disposition that stops to consider stimuli rather than rushing to engage with them is its long association with intellectual and artistic achievement. Neither E=mc2 nor Paradise Lost was dashed off by a party animal.
Schwartz's research suggests something important: we can stretch our personalities, but only up to a point. Our inborn temperaments influence us, regardless of the lives we lead. A sizeable part of who we are is ordained by our genes, by our brains, by our nervous systems. And yet the elasticity that Schwartz found in some of the high-reactive teens also suggests the converse: we have free will and can use it to shape our personalities.
Solitude matters. And for some people it's the air they breathe.
There is no such thing as maturity. There is instead an ever-evolving process of maturing. Because when there is a maturity, there is a conclusion and a cessation. That’s the end. That’s when the coffin is closed. You might be deteriorating physically in the long process of aging, but your personal process of daily discovery is ongoing. You continue to learn more and more about yourself every day.
I was a daydreamer, and there is a lot of history and geography and science I missed out on because I was in my head. And I regret that.
At birth, we emerge from dream soup. At death, we sink back into dream soup. In between soups, there is a crossing of dry land. Life is a portage.
One of the misfortunes of our time is that in getting rid of false shame, we have killed off so much real shame as well.