A Quote by David Macaulay

Occasionally, I just need to escape from my work or be reminded of the comparative bliss of my own life, so I pick up a novel. — © David Macaulay
Occasionally, I just need to escape from my work or be reminded of the comparative bliss of my own life, so I pick up a novel.
Occasionally, very occasionally, say at four o’clock in the afternoon on a wet Sunday, she feels panic-stricken and almost breathless with loneliness. Once or twice she has been known to pick up the phone to check that it isn’t broken. Sometimes she thinks how nice it would be to be woken by a call in the night: ‘get in a taxi now’ or ‘I need to see you, we need to talk’. But at the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel – independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic.
Occasionally pick up speed-for 2 minutes, tops-then settle back into your former pace. Sometimes this is all you need to snap out of a mental and physical funk. Pick a downhill stretch if you can, and really lengthen your stride.
When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration.
For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can always pick up; but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never lay down.
He cleared his throat and reminded himself that if you pissed Her Holiness off, they'd need barbecue tongs to pick up your steaming pieces.
This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone.
Life and work are not things apart. Work is more than gaining privileges and possessions; it is ongoing, ecstatic, LIVING experience. When we tap into living experience, we no longer feel as though we must be king. We can just be ALIVE at work! When we live in the bliss, there is no difficulty which is insurmountable. If we miss the bliss, there is no compensation which is adequate.
Team sports aren't my thing. I find it easier to pick something up if I can do it at my own speed. And you don't need a partner to go running, you don't need a particular place, like in tennis, just a pair of trainers.
Gauntlets are the stuff of every life, but when you learn young how to pick them up, how to work them against the demons, and finally how to outlast if not escape those same demons, life can seem more merciful. It's that long, smooth, false swanning through life that seems to drive a person, sooner or later, into the wall.
To find your own way is to follow your bliss. This involves analysis, watching yourself and seeing where real deep bliss is -- not the quick little excitement , but the real deep, life-filling bliss.
Pick up a yardstick to measure your life against anyone else's, and you've just picked up a stick and beaten up your own soul.
If you have the guts to follow the risk...if one follows what I call one's "bliss" - the thing that really gets you deep in the gut and that you feel is your life - doors will open up...if you follow your bliss, you'll have your bliss, whether you have money or not.
Well, people have been wondering what's going to happen to the novel for two hundred years; its death has been announced many times. You know, I think the novel keeps redefining the world we live in. What you should look for in a novel is a window nobody else is looking out of, that nobody else can look through. What you look for is a voice. You pick up a novel by someone such as Faulkner or Hemingway and you just read three pages and you know who wrote it. And that's what one should demand of a novelist.
A novel, of course, is a fully self-contained work of art. You pick it up off the shelf, open it, and there it is - a whole universe waiting for you to enter. A screenplay is just a blueprint for making a movie. Until the movie is actually filmed, the script really means nothing.
...Bliss is not something to be got. On the other hand you are always Bliss. This desire [for Bliss] is born of the sense of incompleteness. To whom is this sense of incompleteness? Enquire. In deep sleep you were blissful. Now you are not so. What has interposed between that Bliss and this non-bliss? It is the ego. Seek its source and find you are Bliss.
We have a revolutionary history to honor and uphold. Which was what Nelson Mandela did. He reminded us of that which we need to be reminded, over and over again, about our own best selves.
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