“To know what you prefer,
instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world says you ought to prefer,
is to have kept your soul alive.”
-Robert Louis Stevenson
(Photo: Louis the Pug)
A Favorite Quote
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
as george from vinyl ink used to say . . .”the art we hate is more important than the art we sort of like.”
- dbh
“Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.
You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.
To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.”
–Bill Watterson
Not a favorite, but a good recent one:
” . . . the free-floating weirdness of American life will always escape any attempts to make us seem like a normal country rather than a furious human-wave assault on the farthest shores of reality.” – David Samuels, Harper’s Magazine
Though Amanda, your quote opens up some interesting doors, mostly around the idea of a canon, be it in literature, art, music, cinema, etc.
I hate Bob Dylan. Or more to the point, I hate his music. And the way he performs it. Bob Dylan is by all popular accounts, a timeless musician of unmatched talents, who I will undoubtedly learn to love if I only give him a chance. (Your husband has told me this repeatedly.) But I’ve given him a chance, and his music makes me want to torture small animals in a long and drawn out fashion. With joy and malice.
I do, however, love cheesy pop like the Spice Girls or the Go-Gos. Given the inclusiveness of much of the creative set, it took me a long time to admit that freely, and I still get dismissed frequently for my opinions. Which is fine, since I do embrace the idea of your quote of choice. Frankly, I’ve given up caring what other people think.
But it brings up a lot of questions of what makes something good / bad / neutral, and why is there such a strong cult around these subjective opinions? We talked in earlier threads about what makes something creative, but this is a different issue. How does the zeitgeist start around something being “good”, and how does it get adopted universally?
More lunchtime ponderings.
Now THAT is a handsome looking pug, yo!