Quotes – j’s notes

“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”
Joan Didion 1975 Commencement Address at the University of California, Riverside

I want to remind readers that Facebook was not started for news. Our readers took news there because we in our field did not provide the mechanisms for them to share it and discuss it with friends outside of awful comments sections. Twitter was not started for news; our readers, as witnesses to news, chose to share it there. Google was not started for news; our industry could not get its act together (see: New Century Network) to provide an overview of the news ecosystem. We could have started Next Door to allow our local readers to meet with neighbors years ago, but Silicon Valley beat us to it. Our readers deserted us because the net provided mechanisms we did not. And we did not because our colleagues in news have been too busy trying to find new ways to pay for old ways instead.
Jeff Jarvis – CJR: Talking with Jeff Jarvis about forcing Big Tech to pay for news

And I think that the ultimate way you and I get lucky is if you have some success early in life, you get to find out early it doesn’t mean anything. Which means you get to start early the work of figuring out what does mean something.
David Foster Wallace

Life is to live and life is to give and talents are
to use for good if you choose.
Do not pray for easy lives.
Pray to be stronger.
Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers.
Pray for powers equal to your tasks —
then the doing of your work shall be no
miracle but you shall be a miracle.
Every day you shall wonder at yourself …
at the richness of life which has come
to you by the grace of God. But everyone
needs someone — knowing that
somewhere someone is thinking of you.
Fr. Solanus Casey

Sometimes you get your ass whooped, right? And it doesn’t go your way. And you got to take your whooping and move on and get better and come back to the next thing.
Mike Rhoades

Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man.
Benjamin Franklin

Geez, if I could get through to you, kiddo, that depression is not sobbing and crying and giving vent, it is plain and simple reduction of feeling. Reduction, see? Of all feeling. People who keep stiff upper lips find that it’s damn hard to smile.
Judith Guest, Ordinary People

‪All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
Blaise Pascal

Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning.
Johan Huizinga

Now let me suggest first that if we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone, and as long as we try, the more we are going to have war in this world. Now the judgment of God is upon us, and we must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools.
Martin Luther King’s Last Christmas Sermon