82
" They were readers for whom literature was a drug, each complex plot line delivering a new high, suspending them above reality, allowing them a magical crossover...They had spoken often, with rueful honesty, of how the books they read represented escape, offered pathways to literary landscapes that intrigued and engrossed...From childhood on, books had been the hot air balloons that carried them above the angry mutterings of quarreling parents, schoolyard rejections, academic boredom...They were of a kind, readers from birth. "
90
" If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination. Artistic accounts include severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us. A travel book may tell us, for example, that the narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill town of X and after a night in its medieval monastery awoke to a misty dawn. But we never simply 'journey through an afternoon'. We sit in a train. Lunch digests awkwardly within us. The seat cloth is grey. We look out the window at a field. We look back inside. A drum of anxieties resolves in our consciousness. We notice a luggage label affixed to a suitcase in a rack above the seats opposite. We tap a finger on the window ledge. A broken nail on an index finger catches a thread. It starts to rain. A drop wends a muddy path down the dust-coated window. We wonder where our ticket might be. We look back at the field. It continues to rain. At last, the train starts to move. It passes an iron bridge, after which it inexplicably stops. A fly lands on the window And still we may have reached the end only of the first minute of a comprehensive account of the events lurking within the deceptive sentence 'He journeyed through the afternoon'.
A storyteller who provides us with such a profusion of details would rapidly grow maddening. Unfortunately, life itself often subscribes to this mode of storytelling, wearking us out with repetitions, misleading emphases[,] and inconsequential plot lines. It insists on showing us Burdak Electronics, the safety handle in the car, a stray dog, a Christmas card[,] and a fly that lands first on the rim and then the centre of a laden ashtray.
Which explains the curious phenomenon whereby valuable elements may be easier to experience in art and in anticipation than in reality. The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress; they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments, and thus, without either lying or embellishing, they lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting woolliness of the present. "
― Alain de Botton , The Art of Travel
91
" Good dreams don't have to fade upon waking. We each hold in ourselves the best of all of us, and the worst. Change happens every day. We who go to bed at night are not the we who woke up. The you of tomorrow may not recognize the you of today, but wouldn't it be a shame if you don't recognize who you're going to be?Your mind is powerful. Use it to stretch the edges of yourself, find the loops that keep you in place and introduce something new, or take something out. Change happens every day. It's what separates the animate from the inanimate, the plant from the stone. The moment you stop changing is the moment you stop being alive.All living things grow, but only physically. To be human is to grow mentally, emotionally. You are not the you of yesterday, let alone yesteryear. From the worst of us to the best, each has grown, and each can grow more. The moment you stop growing is the moment you stop exemplifying that which is uniquely human. Change happens every day. When you change, you can change back. You can cut away who you were and start anew, and then do it again in reverse. But when you grow, you build on who you were. You cannot unknow what you make a part of you, what you keep of yourself. There is no going back: only forward. Only upwards. Only outwards.Everything in you is a tool you can wield. We each can create the reason behind everything in our lives. Change happens every day. When you apply a reason for the good in you, the bad in you, you plot a map that your future self will walk. Choice is more than an action in a moment. Choice is an attitude in a lifetime.Change happens every day. Choose to grow. "
98
" HOW TO DRIVE A WRITER CRAZY“1. When he starts to outline a story, immediately give him several stories just like it to read and tell him three other plots. This makes his own story and his feeling for it vanish in a cloud of disrelated facts." 2. When he outlines a character, read excerpts from stories about such characters, saying that this will clarify the writer's ideas. As this causes him to lose touch with the identity he felt in his character by robbing him of individuality, he is certain to back away from ever touching such a character." 3. Whenever the writer proposes a story, always mention that his rate, being higher than other rates of writers in the book, puts up a bar to his stories." 4. When a rumor has stated that a writer is a fast producer, invariably confront him with the fact with great disapproval, as it is, of course, unnatural for one human being to think faster than another." 5. Always correlate production and rate, saying that it is necessary for the writer to do better stories than the average for him to get any consideration whatever." 6. It is a good thing to mention any error in a story bought, especially when that error is to be editorially corrected, as this makes the writer feel that he is being criticized behind his back and he wonders just how many other things are wrong." 7. Never fail to warn a writer not to be mechanical, as this automatically suggests to him that his stories are mechanical and, as he considers this a crime, wonders how much of his technique shows through and instantly goes to much trouble to bury mechanics very deep—which will result in laying the mechanics bare to the eye." 8. Never fail to mention and then discuss budget problems with a writer, as he is very interested." 9. By showing his vast knowledge of a field, an editor can almost always frighten a writer into mental paralysis, especially on subjects where nothing is known anyway." 10. Always tell a writer plot tricks, as they are not his business. "
