There have been times of late when it felt as if you were no longer in control of your own destiny, and there are more such times to come. One thing you will always be in control of is how much love you give to other people. Give more this weekend.More crown of love here.
"I'm not motivated by power or money. What I am motivated by is just a brilliant day, every day." (132)
"I love life. I feel very privileged. I sometimes think I'm going to step into the street and get hit by a bus because I've had so many brilliant days for so long. I think: 'Why have I been so lucky?' I never assume anything. I never assume that I'm always going to be healthy, or happy, or that business is always going to be successful. Those things, and Pauline, keep me grounded. " (100)
"It's often more interesting to meet people from outside fashion. I'm most proud of sticking by my own ideas, and not allowing myself to be sucked down the usual path of fashion designers... I think I'm really disappointed by the way the world is going now, with everybody wanting to move so fast, and nobody allowing enough time to gain the experience that you need to do things well... Like everything in life, there should be a balance between the modern way and the more traditional way. With architecture, you've got to understand the formal procedure. With fashion, you've got to understand about pattern-cutting, about production methods, about how garments are made. Then if you want to reject them, that's fine, but you have to have knowledge in order to reject or edit." (190)
"Eccentricity is an essential part of being British, so why shouldn't it be part of the business world? As for me, I have this feeling that I'm going to get even more eccentric as I get older." (142)
[photo by David Sandison from The Independent]
Also, I thought the recent contents of the recycling box were interesting.
Now, ready to forge ahead into this fabulous new year. Despite the fact that it is still snowing in Vancouver...
(The view from my living room window.)
I am an artist... It's self-evident that what the word implies is looking for something all the time without ever finding it in full. It is the opposite of saying, "I know all about it. I've already found it." As far as I'm concerned, the word means, "I am looking. I am hunting for it, I am deeply involved."
-- Vincent van Gogh
And while life can have about it a whiff of the mausoleum, art can so enliven itself and others as to enter fully into the realm of the corporeal. This was the experience of Marcel Proust (whom Gordimer describes as 'my great mentor'): 'No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived as those we had regarded as not being lived at all: the days spent wholly with a favourite book.' This was likewise the experience of Proust's own mentor, John Ruskin: 'the real force of genius is to make us love a thought which we feel to be more real than ourselves.' And of Gordimer herself: 'to be literate is to be someone whose crucially formative experience may come just as well from certain books as from events. I know that until I was at least twenty nothing and no one influenced me as much as certain poets and writers.'If anyone out there has recommendations for great poetry/fiction they're reading right now, I'd love to hear them.
