Writing Holly Jade Writing Holly Jade

I walk into the fire always, and come out more alive

I write as I breathe, naturally, flowingly, spontaneously, out of an overflow, not as a substitute for life. I am more interested in human beings than in writing, more interested in lovemaking than in writing, more interested in living than in writing. More interested in becoming a work of art than in creating one. I am more interesting than what I write. I am gifted in relationship above all things. I have no confidence in myself and great confidence in others. I need love more than food. I stumble and make errors, and often want to die. When I look most transparent is probably when I have just come out of the fire. I walk into the fire always, and come out more alive. ~ Anaïs Nin, Letter to Leo Lerman, December 1946

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Philosophy Holly Jade Philosophy Holly Jade

In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves

Growing, ripening, aging, dying — the passing of time is predestined, inevitable. There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work… In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion. ~ Simone de Beauvoir

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Philosophy Holly Jade Philosophy Holly Jade

Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred? - Richard Dawkins

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Philosophy Holly Jade Philosophy Holly Jade

Is it possible for a man to be a good man when he is also a bad man?

Is it possible for a man to be a good man when he is also a bad man? Is it possible for evil to coexist with goodness and if so do those terms mean anything anymore when they are pushed into such an uncomfortable and perhaps irreconcilable alliance? It may be, I thought, that when good and evil were separated they both became equally destructive; that the saint was as appalling and dangerous a figure as the out-and-out rogue. However, when rightness and wrongness were combined in the right proportions, just so, like whiskey and sweet vermouth, that was what constructed the classic Manhattan cocktail of the human animal (yes, with a splash of bitters and a rub of orange peel, and you can allegorize those elements as you please, and the rocks in the glass as well). But I had never known what to make of this yin-and-yang notion. Maybe the union of opposites to form nature was just what human beings told themselves to rationalise away their imperfections. Maybe it was just too neat, and the truth was that evil deeds trumped good ones. It didn’t matter, for example, that Hitler was kind to dogs. ~ Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

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Philosophy Holly Jade Philosophy Holly Jade

At once the third eyes in our pineal glands opened and we understood the secrets of the world

Already high on life, we broke open the long-preserved pack of Afghan Moon and inhaled. At once the third eyes in our pineal glands opened as my father had said they would and we understood the secrets of the world. We saw that the world was neither meaningless nor absurd, that in fact it had profound meaning and form, but that form and meaning had been hidden from us until now, concealed in the hieroglyphics and esoterica of power, because it was in the interests of the masters of of the world to hide meaning from all but the illuminated. We understood also that it was up to us to save the planet and that the force that would save the planet was love. … Tonight was for love, said the Afghan Moon, tonight was for the celebration of living bodies and for saying farewell to the lost bodies of departed loved ones, but after the sun rose in the morning, there would be no time to lose. ~ Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

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Creativity, Philosophy Holly Jade Creativity, Philosophy Holly Jade

But making money is art, and working is art - and good business is the best art

Business art is the step that comes after art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. During the hippie era people put down the idea of business. They’d say “money is bad” and “working is bad”. But making money is art, and working is art - and good business is the best art. ~ Andy Warhol, The Andy Warhol Diaries

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Music, Writing Holly Jade Music, Writing Holly Jade

You can't tell where the music ends and the emotions begin

Listen intently to a voice singing without words. It may charm you into crying, force you to dance, fill you with rage, or make you jump for joy. You can't tell where the music ends and the emotions begin, for the whole thing is a kind of music—the voice playing on your nerves as the breath plays on a flute. All experience is just that, except that its music has many more dimensions than sound. It vibrates in the dimensions of sight, touch, taste, and smell, and in the intellectual dimension of symbols and words—all evoking and playing upon each other. ~ Alan Watts

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Creativity, Creative Process Holly Jade Creativity, Creative Process Holly Jade

It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation

The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation. ~ Patti Smith

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Culture Holly Jade Culture Holly Jade

C.S Lewis on living in an atomic age

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

— C.S Lewis, Living in an Atomic Age (1948), Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays

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Writing Holly Jade Writing Holly Jade

Everyone lies about writing

Everyone lies about writing. They lie about how easy it is or how hard it was. They perpetuate a romantic idea that writing is some beautiful experience that takes place in an architectural room filled with leather novels and chai tea. They talk about their ‘morning ritual’ and how they ‘dress for writing’ and the cabin in Big Sur where they go to ‘be alone’ - blah blah blah. No one tells the truth about writing a book. Authors pretend their stories were always shiny and perfect and just waiting to be written. The truth is, writing is this: hard and boring and occasionally great but usually not. Even I have lied about writing. I have told people that writing this book has been like brushing away dirt from a fossil. What a load of shit. It has been like hacking away at a freezer with a screwdriver. ~ Amy Poehler, Yes, Please

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Creative Process Holly Jade Creative Process Holly Jade

Art is trying to bring you closer

What an artist is trying to do for people is bring them closer to something, because of course art is about sharing: you wouldn’t be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience, a thought. I am constantly preoccupied with how to remove distance so that we can all come closer together, so that we can all begin to sense that we are the same, we are one. ~ David Hockney

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Culture Holly Jade Culture Holly Jade

The soundtrack to passing thoughts

But here’s what Older Self will not have the heart to say: some of the music you are now listening to — the CDs you play while you stare out the window and think about the five million different ways your life might go — will be unbearable to listen to in twenty years. They will be unbearable not because they will sound dated and trite but because they will sound like the lining of your soul. They will take you straight back to the place you were in when you felt that anything could happen at any time, that your life was a huge room with a thousand doors, that your future was not only infinite but also elastic. They will be unbearable because they will remind you that at least half of the things you once planned for your future are now in the past and others got reabsorbed into your imagination before you could even think about acting on them. It will be as though you’d never thought of them in the first place, as if they were never meant to be anything more than passing thoughts you had while playing your stereo at night. ~ Megan Daum, The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion

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Writing Holly Jade Writing Holly Jade

A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house

A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you. ~ Alice Munro, Selected Stories, 1986 - 1994

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Brands, Philosophy Holly Jade Brands, Philosophy Holly Jade

Life’s too short to play small with your talents

Life’s too short to play small with your talents. You were born into the opportunity as well as the responsibility to become legendary. You’ve been built to achieve master-work level projects, designed to realise unusually important pursuits and constructed to be a force for good on this tiny planet. You have it in you to reclaim sovereignty over your primal greatness in a civilisation that has become fairly uncivilised. To restore your nobility in a global community where the majority shops for nice shoes and acquires expensive things yet rarely invests in a better self. Your personal leadership requires — no, demands — that you stop being a cyber-zombie relentlessly attracted to digital services ad restructure your life to model mastery, exemplify decency and relinquish the self-centeredness that keeps good people limited. The great women and men of the world were all givers, not takers. Renounce the common delusion that those who accumulate the most win. Instead, do work that is heroic —that staggers your marketplace by the quality of its originality as well as from the helpfulness it provides. While you do so, my recommendation is that you also create a private life strong in ethics, rich with marvelous beauty, and unyielding when it comes to the protection of your inner peace. This, my friends, is how you soar with the angels. And walk alongside the gods. ~ The Spellbinder | Robin Sharma, The 5am Club

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Philosophy Holly Jade Philosophy Holly Jade

To accept the challenge of the unknown is the only way to grow

Knowledge is certain; the search for personal knowing is very, very hazardous. Nobody can guarantee it. If you ask me if I can guarantee anything, I can only guarantee danger, that much is certain. I can only guarantee you a long adventure with every possibility of going astray and never reaching the goal. But one thing is certain: the very search will help you grow.

I can guarantee only growth. Danger will be there, sacrifice will be there, you will be moving every day into the unknown, into the uncharted, and there will be no map to follow, no guide to follow. Yes, there are millions of dangers and you can go astray and you can get lost, but that is the only way one grows. Insecurity is the only way to grow, to face danger is the only way to grow, to accept the challenge of the unknown is the only way to grow. ~ Osho

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Words Holly Jade Words Holly Jade

I would build my world which while I lived, would be in agreement with all the worlds

I wish I could do whatever I liked behind the curtain of “madness”. Then: I’d arrange flowers, all day long, I’d paint; pain, love and tenderness, I would laugh as much as I feel like at the stupidity of others, and they would all say: “Poor thing, she’s crazy!” (Above all I would laugh at my own stupidity.) I would build my world which while I lived, would be in agreement with all the worlds. The day, or the hour, or the minute that I lived would be mine and everyone else’s - my madness would not be an escape from “reality”. ~ Frida Kahlo

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Philosophy Holly Jade Philosophy Holly Jade

To be is to be perceived, and so to know thyself is only possible through the eyes of the other.

Our lives are not our own. we are bound to others, past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future. Truth is singular. Its 'versions' are mistruths. To be is to be perceived, and so to know thyself is only possible through the eyes of the other.

The nature of our immortal lives is in the consequences of our words and deeds, that go and impressionate themselves throughout all time. Yesterday, my life was headed in one direction. Today, it is headed in another. Yesterday I believed that I would never have done what I did today.

These forces that often remake time and space, that can shape and alter who we imagine ourselves to be, begin long before we are born and continue after we perish. Our lives and our choices, like quantum trajectories, are understood moment to moment. At each point of intersection, each encounter suggests a new potential direction. ~ Cloud Atlas

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Philosophy Holly Jade Philosophy Holly Jade

Those who are free dance

Dancing transforms everything, demands everything, and judges no one. Those who are free dance, even if they find themselves in a cell or a wheelchair, because dancing is not the mere repetition of certain movements, it’s a conversation with a Being greater and more powerful than everyone and everything. To dance is to use a language beyond selfishness and fear. ~ Paulo Coelho, Hippie

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