“Yes, bring your nothing, play the drum.” (Desiring God)
Quotes
There are 94 posts filed in Quotes (this is page 8 of 10).
The end of one fish two fish is terrific
I’ve been really into Dr. Seuss recently — buying up all the titles I can find at Half Price Books, garage sales and online to read to my kids.
I recently snagged One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish and I can’t get over how much I love the ending. Here it is:
Keep searching
Tiger Woods hired a new swing coach consultant named Chris Como which is…whatever…but I loved what USC’s golf coach had to say about him:
On being a lifelong learner
I loved this on being a lifelong learner as a Christian.
“The heart of lifelong learning that is explicitly Christian is not merely digging deeper in the seemingly bottomless store of information there is to learn about the world and humanity and history, but plunging into the infinite flood of Christ’s love, and how it all comes back to this, in its boundless breath and length and height and depth, and seeing everything else in its light.”
How to know what to make
Lorne Michaels on trying to figure out what SNL was eventually going to become. He spoke of scratching his own itch when he was trying to fill the set list.
“What can I do that will keep me interested?”
That was the question he kept asking himself. It’s one you should constantly be asking yourself, too.
The value of obscurity
I was listening to this podcast between Lorne Michaels and Bill Simmons and Michaels said the following about the beginning of Saturday Night Live in 1975.
SNL had just received a terrible review in the New York Times and Michaels was strangely fine with it.
“It was sort of nice to be dismissed because we were just sort of left alone.”
There’s value in obscurity, especially when you first start.
The scourge of branding
I loved this from the venerable Charlie Pierce on the new College Football Playoff and how much he hates branding:
“There is something fundamentally dehumanizing in the idea that the primary purpose of so many things, and so many people, is to maintain their ability to sell themselves to the suckers.”
I loved what Taylor Swift about surprises
There was a terrific interview in TIME with Taylor Swift last week in which she talked about trying to surprise people who come to her concerts.
She was talking about getting artists like Nicki Minaj, Usher and T.I to come sing with her.
“But it’s worth it because I really want them to have that genuine moment of surprise. It’s very rare in this day and age to surprise people, but I really like doing it.”
It is rare and it is worth it.
It might be the only way to keep folks coming back.
On fame and cultural buzzes
A pretty immense paragraph here:
“Part of embracing our obscurity is realizing the aim to become famous is a pitifully pathetic god. Fame will never satisfy your heart.
It may give you a buzz for a while, but those who try to feed on the buzz of fame are in for the harsh reality that fame only feeds unquenchable desires for more fame, eventually filling the heart with dread and anxiety of the coming day when the fame has passed.” –Desiring God
All our striving is for naught if our God is simply the desire to be known on a larger and larger scale.
Utter silliness.
Is older always better?
Picked this off a great profile in the New Yorker of Misty Copeland:
“But ballet, like so many venerable and beautiful things, has been too easily co-opted into the fallacy of our assumption that its worth today is best measured by fidelity to its original form.”
What a sentence and what a truth.