“Little by little, one travels far.”

[ J. R. R. Tolkien ]

“Do not let yourself be bothered by the inconsequential.

One has only so much time in this world,

so devote it to the work and the people most important to you,

to those you love and things that matter.

One can waste half a lifetime with people one doesn’t really like,

or doing things when one would be better off somewhere else.”

[ Louis L'Amour - Ride the River ]

“Fairness, does not govern life and death.

If it did, no good person would ever die young.”

[ Mitch Albom - The Five People You Meet in Heaven ]

“Making a record is a lot like surgery without an anesthetic.

You first have to cut yourself up the middle.

Then you have to rip out every single organ, every single part and lay them on a table.

You then need to examine the parts, and the reality of the situation hits you.

You find yourself saying things like

“I didn’t know that part was so ugly.”

Or

“I better get a professional opinion about that.”

You go to bed hollow and then back into the operating room the next day

. . .facing every fear,

every disgusting thing you hate about yourself.

Then you pop it all back in, sew yourself shut and perform

. . . you perform like your life depended on it

—-and in those perfect moments you find beauty you never knew existed.

You find yourself and you friends all over again,

you find something to fight for,

something to love.

Something to show the world.”

[ Gerard Way ]

“He saw that all the struggles of life were incessant, laborious, painful,

that nothing was done quickly, without labor,

that it had to undergo a thousand fondlings,

revisings,

moldings,

addings,

removings,

graftings,

tearings,

correctings,

smoothings,

rebuildings,

reconsiderings,

nailings,

tackings,

chippings,

hammerings,

hoistings,

connectings

— all the poor fumbling uncertain incompletions of human endeavor.

They went on forever and were forever incomplete,

far from perfect,

refined,

or smooth,

full of terrible memories of failure and fears of failure,

yet,

in the way of things,

somehow noble,

complete,

and shining in the end.”

[ Jack Kerouac - The Town and the City ]

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”

[ Winston Churchill ]

“Mr. Constant,”

he said,

“right now you’re as easy for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to watch as a man on a street corner selling apples and pears.

But just imagine how hard you would be to watch if you had a whole office building jammed to the rafters with industrial bureaucrats

—men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and demand everything in quintuplicate,

and who understand perhaps a third of what is said to them;

who habitually give misleading answers in order to gain time in which to think,

who make decisions only when forced to, and who then cover their tracks;

who make perfectly honest mistakes in addition and subtraction,

who call meetings whenever they feel lonely,

who write memos whenever they feel unloved;

men who never throw anything away unless they think it could get them fired.

A single industrial bureaucrat,

if he is sufficiently vital and nervous,

should be able to create a ton of meaningless papers a year for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to examine.”

[ Kurt Vonnegut - The Sirens of Titan ]

“…time was not passing…it was turning in a circle…”

[  Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude ]

“When we have done our best, we should wait the result in peace.”

[ John Lubbock ]

“We want not so much a Father but a grandfather in heaven,

a God who said of anything we happened to like doing,

‘What does it matter so long as they are contented?”

[ C. S. Lewis - The Problem of Pain ]