martinimade

"... I think that hope is a moral obligation and I've been saying that for a long time now. I don't think that hope is just a feeling state. I think that hope is a choice you make. It's not a choice to deny reality, but it's a choice to use your intelligence to examine the world in front of you and the obstacles to progress and to try to identify places from whence progress can reasonably be anticipated and to try to put your efforts into making those -- I mean that, to me, is what hope is, it's an activity. Just as I think despair is, I think that both take effort. And I remain optimistic, I think that is still work to do."

-- Playwright Tony Kushner, as quoted in Andrea Bernstein's (amazing) American Oligarchs.

"Another cornerstone — when you think you are running hard, run harder. Try to keep running harder for longer than you think you can, bringing your body and your mind closer to the edge, that moment when the ritual becomes the revelation. Running, he knows, is filled with truths that can be found only when we learn to be comfortable with discomfort, to go to the place we fear more than any other — and stay there, without fear."

-- from Matthew Futterman's book about running guru Bob Larsen, as quoted in the NYT

Afterward, it will be easier for people to see the Ivanka that Ivanka wants to be seen. “Look, this crowd is not off reading Rosa Luxemburg at two in the morning,” says Rich Farley, a New York lawyer and the author of Wall Street Wars. “They invited Roy Cohn back with open arms.” Farley is sure: “The only unpardonable sin in New York society is poverty.”

-- from Elaina Plott's profile of Ivanka Trump in The Atlantic

"It is a self-contained city (subsidized by my taxes) for recent transplants to New York who make a billion dollars and do not ever think about money. Working up the energy to be upset about its inception is low on my list; I would much rather enjoy the utter weirdness of a real estate developer’s vision of grandeur. Every city in the world will eventually look the same and this is an inevitability I have chosen to accept. Ideally, I will be dead by then, and then, of course, I will no longer care."

-- From Megan Reynolds' piece on Hudson Yards. Stay for the last paragraph.

“Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work.” 

— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

"The servers seemed eager to oblige, but gave the impression of struggling in the face of unseen enemies."

-- Pete Wells' review of Bluebird London is a thing of beauty.

“She’d come to her job inside the little box marked ‘Rural Development’ without any particular ambition to be there. The sums of money at her disposal were incredible: the little box gave our or guaranteed $30 billion in loans or grants a year. But people who should have known about it hadn’t the first clue what it was up to. ‘I had this conversation with elected and state officials almost everywhere in the South,’ said Salerno. ‘Them: We hate the government and you suck. Me: My mission alone put $1 billion into your economy this year, so are you sure about that? Me thinking: We are the only reason your shitty state is standing.’"

-- The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis. Highly recommend.

"It doesn’t matter how scared you are; everyone is scared. Work. Work is the only thing that takes the curse of fear away."

-- Jerry Saltz: How to Be an Artist (which while it is focused more on visual arts really applies to any creative field.)

"If A, then B," is what we were taught. If you are pure — non-sexual to whatever extent is the requirement — before marriage, then you will have a perfect, blissful highly sexual life after marriage. You will please your husband. He will never leave you. He will never cheat on you, because you will be such a sexual delight for him.

American sports have seen their share of colorful minor leagues, but none quite as crazy as the USFL, which, as Pearlman writes, "enlisted your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, your one-armed and chain-smoking and half-blind and clinically insane." 

-- from Michael Schaub's review of Football for a Buck, a book that I'm now going to have to get based on the review alone.