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1 " The aim of all life is death. Life is the apprenticeship that we serve preparing for death. Life is the fleeting spark of divinity that precedes a deathless eternity. "
2 " Anyway, my writer gang: they kind of did their comedy apprenticeship with me and, during that period, when they were young and impressionable, I think I infected them with my pun virus. They grew to enjoy puns, think puns, just as much as me. The problem is people don't really like puns any more, so I worry I've rendered the poor fuckers virtually unemployable. "
3 " No apprenticeship has ever been thought necessary to qualify for husbandry, the great trade of the country. After what are called the fine arts, and the liberal professions, however, there is perhaps no trade which requires so great a variety of knowledge and experience. "
― Adam Smith , An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
4 " Our children start out as good readers and will remain so if the adults around them nourish their enthusiasm instead of trying to prove themselves. If we stimulate their desire to learn before making them recite out loud; if we support them in their efforts instead of trying to catch them out; if we give up whole evenings instead of trying to save time; if we make the present come alive without threatening them with the future; if we refuse to turn pleasure into a chore but nurture it instead. If we do all this, we ourselves will rediscover the pleasure of giving freely-- because all cultural apprenticeship is free. "
― Daniel Pennac , Comme un roman
5 " A long apprenticeship is the most logical way to success. The only alternative is overnight stardom, but I can't give you a formula for that. "
6 " Pregnancy = " the slow, difficult, and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself. The ability to succeed in this path without masochism and without annihilating one's affective, intellectual, and professional personality - such would seem to be the stakes to be won through guiltless maternity. "
7 " There have been occasions in my later life (I suppose as in most lives) when I have felt for a time as if a thick curtain had fallen on all its interest and romance, to shut me out from anything save dull endurance any more. Never has that curtain dropped so heavy and blank, as when my way in life lay stretched out straight before me through the newly-entered road of apprenticeship to Joe. "
― Charles Dickens , Great Expectations
8 " Many skills, as every successful entrepreneur knows, cannot be taught in school. They require doing. Sometimes a life of doing. And where money-making is concerned, nothing compresses the time frame needed to leap from my-shit-just-sits-there-until-it-rains poverty to which-of-my-toilets-shall-I-use affluence like an apprenticeship with someone who already has the angles all figured out. "
― Mohsin Hamid , How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia
9 " It is not possible to know how far the influence of any amiable, honest-hearted duty-doing man flies out into the world, but it is very possible to know how it has touched one's self in going by, and I know right well that any good that intermixed itself with my apprenticeship came of plain contented Joe, and not of restlessly aspiring discontented me. "
10 " One of the most beautifully disturbing questions we can ask, is whether a given story we tell about our lives is actually true, and whether the opinions we go over every day have any foundation or are things we repeat to ourselves simply so that we will continue to play the game. It can be quite disorienting to find that a story we have relied on is not only not true - it actually never was true. Not now not ever. There is another form of obsolescence that can fray at the cocoon we have spun about ourselves, that is, the story was true at one time, and for an extended period; the story was even true and good to us, but now it is no longer true and no longer of any benefit, in fact our continued retelling of it simply imprisons us. We are used to the prison however, we have indeed fitted cushions and armchairs and made it comfortable and we have locked the door from the inside.The imprisoning story I identified by the time the entree was served was one I had told myself for a long time. “In order to write I need peace and quiet and an undisturbed place far from others or the possibility of being disturbed. I knew however, that if I wanted to enter the next creative stage, something had to change; I simply did not have enough free space between traveling, speaking and being a good father and husband to write what I wanted to write. The key in the lock turned surprisingly easy, I simply said to myself, “What if I acted as if it wasn’t true any more, what if it had been true at one time, but now at this stage in the apprenticeship I didn’t need that kind of insulation anymore, what if I could write anywhere and at any time?” One of the interesting mercies of this kind of questioning is that it is hard to lose by asking: if the story is still true, we will soon find out and can go back to telling it. If it is not we have turned the key, worked the hinges and walked out into the clear air again with a simple swing of the door. "
― David Whyte
11 " You just hang in there, boy, hang in with that apprenticeship of yours, do you hear me? You are lucky they would even take someone like you. You’re a child of the slums. A ragtag. On top of that, you’re a whining piece of shit. Nobody will ever do anything for you. Do you understand what I’m saying? They’ll let you starve to death, no problem. Nobody is going to cry on your grave.”Poul-Erik’s MotherThe Informer by Steen Langstrup "
― Steen Langstrup , Stikker
12 " India had a very long independence movement. It started in 1886, [with] the first generation of Western-educated Indians. They were all liberals. They followed the Liberal Party in Britain, and they were very proud of their knowledge of parliamentary systems, parliamentary manners. They were big debaters. They [had], as it were, a long apprenticeship in training for being in power. Even when Gandhi made it a mass movement, the idea of elective representatives, elected working committees, elected leadership, all that stayed because basically Indians wanted to impress the British that they were going to be as good as the British were at running a parliamentary democracy. And that helped quite a lot. "
13 " The legend of our times, it has been suggested, might be " The Revenge of Failure" . This is what Envy has done for us. If we cannot paint well, we will destroy the canons of painting and pass ourselves off as painters. If we will not take the trouble to write poetry, we will destroy the rules of prosody and pass ourselves off as poets. If we are not inclined to the rigors of an academic discipline, we will destroy the standards of that discipline and pass ourselves off as graduates. If we cannot or will not read, we will say that " linear thought" is now irrelevant and so dispense with reading. If we cannot make music, we will simply make a noise and persuade others that it is music. If we can do nothing at all, why! we will strum a guitar all day, and call it self-expression. As long as no talent is required, no apprenticeship to a skill, everyone can do it, and we are all magically made equal. Envy has at least momentarily been appeased,and failure has had its revenge. "
14 " Real apprenticeship is ultimately always to the self. "
15 " After moving his family from Yakima to Paradise, California, in 1958, he enrolled at Chico State College. There, he began an apprenticeship under the soon-to-be-famous John Gardner, the first " real writer" he had ever met. " He offered me the key to his office," Carver recalled in his preface to Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist (1983). " I see that gift now as a turning point." In addition, Gardner gave his student " close, line-by-line criticism" and taught him a set of values that was " not negotiable." Among these values were convictions that Carver held until his death. Like Gardner, whose On Moral Fiction (1978) decried the " nihilism" of postmodern formalism, Carver maintained that great literature is life-connected, life-affirming, and life-changing. " In the best fiction," he wrote " the central character, the hero or heroine, is also the ‘moved’ character, the one to whom something happens in the story that makes a difference. Something happens that changes the way that character looks at himself and hence the world." Through the 1960s and 1970s he steered wide of the metafictional " funhouse" erected by Barth, Barthelme and Company, concentrating instead on what he called " those basics of old-fashioned storytelling: plot, character, and action." Like Gardner and Chekhov, Carver declared himself a humanist. " Art is not self-expression," he insisted, " it’s communication. "
16 " War - hard apprenticeship of freedom. "
17 " Before the professionalization of architecture in the nineteenth century, it was standard for an aspiring mason or carpenter to begin his apprenticeship at fourteen and to become a master builder by his early twenties. "
18 " If the first requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite, the second is to put in your apprenticeship as a feeder when you have enough money to pay the check but not enough to produce indifference of the total. "
19 " After I left school, where I studied art, photography and textiles at A-level, I started doing an apprenticeship in interior design, but I wasn't really enjoying it very much, so I decided to do something creative, and in 2009, I began blogging. "
20 " A long apprenticeship is the most logical way to success. The only alternative is overnight stardom, but I can't give you a formula for that. "