boundcreature

Quoting Lin Yutang, from The Importance of Living:

Belief in our mortality... is a gloriously fine thing. It makes us sober; it makes us a little sad; and many of us it makes poetic. But, above all, it makes it possible for us to make up our mind and arrange to live sensibly, truthfully and always with a sense of our own limitations... Deprived of immortality the proposition of living becomes a simple proposition. It is this: that we human beings have a limited span of life to live on this earth, rarely more than seventy years, and that therefore we have to arrange our lives so that we may live as happily as we can under a given set of circumstances.

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Quoting Warren Ellis, from Come In Alone:

Half of this job is being bloody-minded and not stopping until you get what you want. Its not about education I didnt go to university, neither did Garth Ennis, nor Alan Moore or Grant Morrison, and none of us took any special courses in how to write comics because there bloody werent any. All the professional writers I know just saw something they wanted to do and hammered away until they were damn well doing it.

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Quoting John Dewey, from Art as Experience:

An environment that was always and everywhere congenial to the straightaway execution of our impulsions would set a term to growth as surely as one always hostile would irritate and destroy. Impulsion forever boosted on its forward way would run its course thoughtless and dead to emotion. For it would not have to give an account of itself in terms of the things it encounters, and hence they would not become signifigant objects. The only way it can become aware of its nature and its goal is by obstacles surmounted and means employed...

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Quoting Ayn Rand, from Atlas Shrugged:

He had moved toward his goal, sweeping aside everything that did not pertain to it in the world and in himself. His dedication to his work was like one of the fires he dealt with, a fire that burned every lesser element, every impurity out of the white stream of a single metal.

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Quoting Henry Rollins, from Broken Summers:

Out here I have to prove myself night to night. At least I feel I have to. If I dont somehow prove my existence regularly, I feel as though I dont deserve to live. Some might say that this is taking life too seriously. If youre lightweight, then blow away back to your television set and your beer. The mediocre life awaits.

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Quoting Hermann Hesse, from Demian:

Only the ideas that we actually live are of any value.

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Quoting Yamamoto Tsunetomo (translated by William Scott Wilson), from Hagakure, Book of the Samurai:

It is spiritless to think that you cannot attain that which you have seen and heard the masters attain. The masters are men. You are also a man. If you think that you will be inferior in doing something, you will be on that road very soon.

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Quoting Stiff Little Fingers (with Gordon Ogilvie), from Nobody's Hero:

But don't let heroes get your kicks for you
It's up to you and no one else
Try to take control of it
Cos what you see is what you get
Try to take control of it and you'll see

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Quoting Jordan Giarratano , from the introduction to the only published issue of We Must Become Our Heroes:

In this age of unreality where we can search all day and still not find a decent role model, we must become our heroes. Not the "we" as in the collective group sense, but the "we" as in many individuals: as in you, me, him, her, and that nervous guy over there in the corner. Let's stand up for each other and for ourselves. We don't need to be products of society, bad teachers, misguided parents, or calculated consumer trends. We must educate ourselves properly if no one else will. We can break the cycle, step out of it and never look back, except to pull someone else out.

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as you may have guessed by now, this is a selection of quotes that i have scribbled down over the years from various books i've read, etc.

as you may have gathered, i think heroes are important. i also think that they are unimportant. its a bit of a paradox. i believe in looking up and following the lead of others, but first and foremost you always walk your own path and don't get caught up in their glory or tripped up in their failures.

i find myself hopelessly drawn to the punks and the rebels, the voices of the thoroughly reviled and heavily criticized...

which leads me to my final quote:

"Led Zeppelin didn't write tunes that everyone liked, they left that to the BeeGee's."

- Wayne Campbell