James Richardson quotes
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“Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean.”
-- James RichardsonSource : "Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays". Book by James Richardson, 2001.
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“Nothing important comes with instructions.”
-- James RichardsonSource : James Richardson (2010). “By the Numbers”, p.33, Copper Canyon Press
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“What is more yours than what always holds you back?”
-- James RichardsonSource : James Richardson (2016). “By the Numbers”, p.64, Copper Canyon Press
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“When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing.”
-- James Richardson -
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“How sure we are that everyone's watching. How sure we are that no one sees.”
-- James Richardson -
“The happy and the suffering probably understand life equally well, but the sufferers may see a little more clearly how little it is that they understand.”
-- James Richardson -
“I would never accuse Willie Brown of slowing down, because he never does.”
-- James Richardson -
“The road reaches every place, the short cut only one.”
-- James Richardson -
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“Easier to keep changing your life than to live it.”
-- James Richardson -
“Reason is the lesser faith that steers us when we have already lost a greater one.”
-- James RichardsonSource : "Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays". Book by James Richardson, 2001.
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“God help my neighbors if I loved them as I love myself.”
-- James Richardson -
“On what is valuable thieves and the law agree.”
-- James Richardson -
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“Those who are too slow to be intelligent deserve our patience, those who are too quick, our pity.”
-- James Richardson -
“Think of all the smart people made stupid by flaws of character. The finest watch isn't fine long when used as a hammer.”
-- James Richardson -
“How often feelings are circular. How embarrassing to be embarrassed. How annoying to be annoyed.”
-- James Richardson -
“I'm a kid checking mail, a kid on his cell with his questions: are we in love, Life, are we exclusive, are we forever?”
-- James Richardson -
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“Metaphor isn't just a fancy turn of speech. It shapes our thoughts and feelings, reaches out to grasp new experience, and even binds our five disparate senses. James Geary's fascinating and utterly readable I is an Other brings the news on metaphor from literature and economics, from neuroscience and politics, illuminating topics from consumer behavior to autism spectrum disorders to the evolution of language. As a writer, as a teacher, and as someone just plain fascinated by how our minds work, I've been waiting years for exactly this book.”
-- James Richardson -
“You have two kinds of secrets. The ones only you know. The ones only you don't.”
-- James RichardsonSource : James Richardson (2010). “By the Numbers”, p.34, Copper Canyon Press
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“Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?”
-- James Richardson -
“All work is the avoidance of harder work.”
-- James RichardsonSource : "2016 Poetry Month: An Interview With James Richardson". Interview with Jonathan Hobratsch, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 1, 2016.
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“There are silences harder to take back than words.”
-- James Richardson -
“It is the empty seats that listen most raptly.”
-- James RichardsonSource : James Richardson (2016). “By the Numbers”, p.63, Copper Canyon Press
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“It is by now proverbial that every proverb has its opposite. For every Time is money there is a Stop and smell the roses. When someone says You never stand in the same river twice someone else has already replied There is nothing new under the sun. In the mind's arithmetic, 1 plus -1 equals 2. Truths are not quantities but scripts: Become for a moment the mind in which this is true.”
-- James Richardson -
“If it can be used again, it is not wisdom but theory.”
-- James Richardson -
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“Sophistication is upscale conformity.”
-- James RichardsonSource : James Richardson (2016). “By the Numbers”, p.45, Copper Canyon Press
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“Bitterness is a greater failure than failure.”
-- James RichardsonSource : "Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays". Book by James Richardson, 2001.
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“Any virtue systematically applied becomes a vice. Morality is attention, not system.”
-- James RichardsonSource : "Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays". Book by James Richardson, 2001.
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“If you do more than your share you'd better want to: otherwise, you're paying yourself in a currency recognized nowhere else.”
-- James Richardson -
“I don't know what's meant by Know thyself, which seems to ask a window to look at a window.”
-- James RichardsonSource : "Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-second Essays". Book by James Richardson, 2001.
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“A day is only a day. But a life is only a life.”
-- James Richardson -
“Your choices: spend, and believe in things; save, and believe in money.”
-- James Richardson -
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“I'll buy that means also I believe it.”
-- James Richardson -
“To condemn your sin in another is hypocrisy. Not to condemn is to reserve your right to sin.”
-- James Richardson -
“The god of many cannot remain the true god.”
-- James Richardson -
“Success is whatever humiliation everyone has agreed to compete for.”
-- James Richardson -
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“The drives were nature's first provision: thinking was added later, to get us around the world's obstacles to them.”
-- James Richardson -
“There are crimes I don't commit mainly because I don't want to find out I could.”
-- James Richardson -
“So many times I've made myself stupid with the fear of being outsmarted.”
-- James Richardson -
“Let me have my dreams but not what I dream of.”
-- James Richardson -
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“It's amazing that I sit at my job all day and no one sees me clearly enough to say What is that boy doing behind a desk?”
-- James Richardson -
“Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity, you make a new smear.”
-- James Richardson -
“The first quest or the first love is also the last. The second isn't.”
-- James Richardson -
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“They say productivity is the key to confidence, and confidence ... to productivity. And they're happy walking back and forth between these two rooms, each the excuse for the other.”
-- James RichardsonSource : "Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays". Book by James Richardson, 2001.
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“The cynic suffers the form of faith without love. Incredulity is his piety.”
-- James Richardson -
“Happiness is the readiness to be happy.”
-- James Richardson -
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“Hasn't there ... been a little too much zeal in our reproof of children and friends for yielding to the temptations we ourselves find it most difficult to resist? We punish where we can least afford to sympathize. Of all the horrors of the daily news, it seems hardest to imagine the kind of cruelty that is intensified by the pain of its victims, but whenever we feel sympathy would weaken us, we are a little closer to the torturer.”
-- James Richardson -
“Judging itself brings the pain of being judged. The wicked judge mistakes this for another crime of the accused and lengthens his sentence.”
-- James Richardson -
“Embarrassment is the greatest teacher, but since its lessons are exactly those we have tried hardest to conceal from ourselves, it may teach us, also, to perfect our self-deception.”
-- James Richardson -
“Envy is ashamed of itself. If it weren't hanging back, it would go all the way to emulation and love.”
-- James Richardson -
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“A belief is a question we have put aside so we can get on with what we believe we have to do.”
-- James Richardson -
“Books serve us simply by opening a window on all we wanted to say and feel and think about. We may not even notice that they have not said it themselves till we go back to them years later and do not find what we loved in them. You cannot keep the view by taking the window with you.”
-- James Richardson -
“The best way to get people to do what you want is not to be too particular about what you want.”
-- James Richardson -
“Impatience is not wanting to understand that you don't understand.”
-- James Richardson -
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“To know, you just have to know. To believe, you have to make others believe.”
-- James Richardson -
“To practice Sincerity is to burden everyone else with believing you.”
-- James Richardson -
“Beware of knowing your virtues; you may lose them. Beware of knowing your vices; you may forgive them.”
-- James Richardson -
“I aspire to know when best to walk or eat, which music I need, and how to keep myself sitting as I am now, stubbornly enraptured with doing practically nothing.”
-- James Richardson -
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“The procrastinator dreads beginning, the workaholic, ending.”
-- James Richardson -
“If I do not waste time, I am wasting my time.”
-- James Richardson -
“Seizing on a piece of business, I become tiny, eager, efficient: roiled water I cannot see into.”
-- James Richardson -
“Greater than the temptations of beauty are those of method.”
-- James Richardson -
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“Say too soon what you think and you will say what everyone else thinks.”
-- James RichardsonSource : "Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays". Book by James Richardson, 2001.
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“The mind is like a well-endowed museum, only a small fraction of its holdings on view at any one time.”
-- James Richardson -
“I am not unambitious. I am just too ambitious for what you call ambitions.”
-- James Richardson -
“What I'm not changes more than what I am.”
-- James Richardson -
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“Patience is not very different from courage. It just takes longer.”
-- James Richardson -
“Value yourself according to the burdens you carry, and you will find everything a burden.”
-- James Richardson -
“Suppose you had to remember to beat your heart, contract in exact sequence the muscles you use for every step. ... Conservatism comes out of the body, the sense of many things being done for us that any attempt to re-think, or even make conscious, would fatally disrupt.”
-- James Richardson -
“Solitude takes time. One becomes alone, like a towel drying.”
-- James Richardson -
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“That others know: science. That others choose: politics.”
-- James Richardson -
“There is no road to the land without roads.”
-- James Richardson -
“Happiness, like water, is always available, but so often it seems we'd prefer a different drink.”
-- James Richardson -
“I'm sitting here bored, ... trying to remember that everything is a complete mystery.”
-- James Richardson -
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“What's thinking? You live in a grandly appointed house, but spend all your time rummaging around in the attic for any little trinket you hadn't known was there.”
-- James Richardson -
“The first abuse of power is not realizing that you have it.”
-- James Richardson
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