#dio

...simply moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but world's champions.... A moderately gifted person has to keep his or her gifts all bottled up until, in a manner of speaking, he or she gets drunk at a wedding and tap-dances on the coffee table like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers. We have a name for him or her. We call him or her an "exhibitionist." How do we reward such an exhibitionist? We say to him or her the next morning, "Wow! Were you ever drunk last night! ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#giftedness #mediocrity #communication

I shall be in Paris in two days. Well, all is finished. The waves of human mediocrity rise to the sky and they will engulf the refuge whose dams I open. Ah! courage leaves me, my heart breaks! O Lord, pity the Christian who doubts, the sceptic who would believe, the convict of life embarking alone in the night, under a sky no longer illumined by the consoling beacons of ancient faith. ↗

— Huysmans Joris-Karl Huysmans

#faiths #mediocrity #paris #sceptic #courage

I am the kid who sticks her finger in the light socket. I am the person who doesn't check the expiration date on the milk. I am the idiot who has never looked before she leaped. I am the girl who is falling apart, right now. ↗

— Amy Garvey

#expiration #fall #falling #girl #idiot

You're Dionysus," I said. "The god of wine." Mr. D rolled his eyes. "What do they say these days, Grover? Do the children say 'Well duh!'?" Y-yes, Mr. D." Then, well, duh! Percy Jackson. Did you think I was Aphrodite, perhaps?" You're a god." Yes, child." A god. You. ↗

— Rick Riordan

#grover-underwood #percy-jackson #children

Most humans, in varying degrees, are already dead. In one way or another they have lost their dreams, their ambitions, their desire for a better life. They have surrendered their fight for self-esteem and they have compromised their great potential. They have settled for a life of mediocrity, days of despair and nights of tears. They are no more than living deaths confined to cemeteries of their choice. Yet they need not remain in that state. They can be resurrected from their sorry condition. They can each perform the greatest miracle in the world. They can each come back from the dead... ↗

— Og Mandino

#choices #mediocrity #miracle #potential #potential-for-greatness

It is a terrible moment when you realise you’ll never do all the best things this world can offer; that you’ll never have a superlative experience. You’ll go to a Gala Bingo rather than Vegas; get your own office, but not be a CEO; and get a gravestone, but not in Poet’s Corner. You’ll never sleep with the girls on the TV. And all of this mediocrity was made worse by the fact of its inescapable prevalence. ↗

— Django Wylie

#life #life-lessons #mediocrity #experience

I stared at him (Dionysus). "You're...you're married? But I thought you got in trouble for chasing a wood nymph- ↗

— Rick Riordan

#humor #hypocrite #percy-jackson #humor

Geniuses that point the way exist in abundance, but mediocrity's true prophet has yet to emerge. We may not be able to choose a direction to go, but at least we’re still walking around. ↗

— Benson Bruno

#genius #humor #idiots #funny

I want to broadcast your poem to me over the radio so everyone will know we love each other just as deeply as the people in pop songs. ↗

— Bauvard

#humor #poetry #pop-songs #radio #funny

Children are born with imaginations in mint condition, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Then life corrects for grandiosity. ↗

— Phyllis Theroux

#grandiosity #imagination #imagination