James Richardson
Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.Collection: Reading
Nothing important comes with instructions.Collection: Important
The best way to know your faults is to notice which ones you accuse others of.Collection: Way
Bitterness is a greater failure than failure.Collection: Bitterness
Say too soon what you think and you will say what everyone else thinks.Collection: Thinking
When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing.Collection: Writing
Metaphor isn't just a fancy turn of speech. It shapes our thoughts and feelings, reaches out to grasp new experience, and even binds our five disparate senses. James Geary's fascinating and utterly readable I is an Other brings the news on metaphor from literature and economics, from neuroscience and politics, illuminating topics from consumer behavior to autism spectrum disorders to the evolution of language. As a writer, as a teacher, and as someone just plain fascinated by how our minds work, I've been waiting years for exactly this book.Collection: Teacher
All work is the avoidance of harder work.Collection: Harder
If it can be used again, it is not wisdom but theory.Collection: Used
The happy and the suffering probably understand life equally well, but the sufferers may see a little more clearly how little it is that they understand.Collection: Philosophical
Any virtue systematically applied becomes a vice. Morality is attention, not system.Collection: Vices
Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity, you make a new smear.Collection: Writing
They say productivity is the key to confidence, and confidence ... to productivity. And they're happy walking back and forth between these two rooms, each the excuse for the other.Collection: Keys
Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?Collection: Break
I don't know what's meant by Know thyself, which seems to ask a window to look at a window.Collection: Looks
Sophistication is upscale conformity.Collection: Conformity
How sure we are that everyone's watching. How sure we are that no one sees.Collection: Perception
If you do more than your share you'd better want to: otherwise, you're paying yourself in a currency recognized nowhere else.Collection: Want
Tyranny and fantasy both like to write everyone else's lines.Collection: Writing
It is the empty seats that listen most raptly.Collection: Empty
It is by now proverbial that every proverb has its opposite. For every Time is money there is a Stop and smell the roses. When someone says You never stand in the same river twice someone else has already replied There is nothing new under the sun. In the mind's arithmetic, 1 plus -1 equals 2. Truths are not quantities but scripts: Become for a moment the mind in which this is true.Collection: Opposites
Anger has been ready to be angry.Collection: Ready
Reason is the lesser faith that steers us when we have already lost a greater one.Collection: Reason
You have two kinds of secrets. The ones only you know. The ones only you don't.Collection: Two
There are silences harder to take back than words.Collection: Silence
Too much apology doubles the offense.Collection: Apology
I would never accuse Willie Brown of slowing down, because he never does.Collection: Doe