#spaces

I knew that I did not have to buy into society's notion that I had to be handsome and healthy to be happy. I was in charge of my "spaceship" and it was my up, my down. I could choose to see this situation as a setback or as a starting point. I chose to begin life again. ↗

— Warren Mitchell

#be happy #begin #buy #charge #choose

Every walk carves out a new city. And each of these tiny cities has its main square, a downtown area all its own, its own memorial statue, its own landmarks, laundromats, bus terminal—in short, its own focal point (from the Latin word focus, meaning fireplace, hearth, foyer, home), warm spot, sweet spot, soft spot, hot spot. ↗

— André Aciman

#home

I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces. ↗

— Harold Ross

#back #day #few #filled #his

I try to construct a picture in which shapes, spaces, colors, form a set of unique relationships, independent of any subject matter. At the same time I try to capture and translate the excitement and emotion aroused in me by the impact with the original idea. ↗

— Milton Avery

#aroused #capture #colors #construct #emotion

A fascinating challenge facing today's environmental movement is how to best approach the reversal of past decisions that altered once-pristine environmental spaces for the sake of urgent man-made needs. ↗

— Matt Gonzalez

#approach #best #challenge #decisions #environmental

Our three big emergencies are fire, loss of pressurization or contaminated atmosphere. Any of those things in a spaceship are very deadly and time critical. Everybody's trained, but I'm the commander of the ship, and it's up to me to decide. ↗

— Chris Hadfield

#atmosphere #big #commander #contaminated #critical

I kind of like the challenge of jumping into totally different spaces and styles and figuring out how to fit in. ↗

— Hugo Weaving

#different #figuring #fit #how #i

Thank you to Giulia Fani, Joan Spence and my sister for the rooms and desks they loaned me. ↗

— Moez Surani

#familial-perspectives #favoritism #floaters #graciousness #politicized-spaces

New York may end up being no more than a scrim, a spectral film that is none other than our craving for romance—romance with life, with masonry, with memory, sometimes romance with nothing at all. This longing goes out to the city and from the city comes back to us. Call it narcissism. Or call it passion. It has its flare-ups, its cold nights, its sudden lurches, and its embraces. It is our life finally revealed to us in the most lifeless hard objects we'll ever cast eyes on: concrete, steel, stonework. Our need for intimacy and love is so powerful that we'll look for them and find them in asphalt and soot. ↗

— André Aciman

#life

I drove out of Dartmouth and after a while Start Bay emerged out of the brightening gloom like the end of a set of parentheses in a book about the natural world. Inside the parentheses was a story about the sea. Outside them, the land: green, red and brown fields, and hills curling over the landscape. I saw small, delicate clumps of snowdrops, big rough patches of gorse, and along the thin road, houses with yellow roses and mimosa growing in their gardens. ↗

— Scarlett Thomas

#nature