“Solitude. One knows instinctively it has benefits that must be more deeply satisfying than those of other conditions, but still it is difficult.”
A Sport and a Pastime (1967)
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James Salter17
American novelist and short-story writer 1925–2015Related quotes
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist
Sec. 13
The Gay Science (1882)
André Malraux (1901–1976) French novelist, art theorist and politician
Part II, Chapter III
Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951)
Kathy Freston American self-help writer
Source: Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World (2011), p. 242
Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac
“April: Come High Water”, p. 25.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "April: Come High Water," "April: Draba," "April: Bur Oak," & "April:Sky Dance"
“…conditioning usually reinforces instinct rather than overrides it.”
Matt Ridley (1958) economist
Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 6
Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884–1937) Russian author
On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters (1923)
Context: A new form is not intelligible to everyone; many find it difficult. Perhaps. The ordinary, the banal is, of course, simpler, more pleasant, more comfortable. Euclid's world is very simple, and Einstein's world is very difficult — but it is no longer possible to return to Euclid. No revolution, no heresy is comfortable or easy. For it is a leap, it is a break in the smooth evolutionary curve, and a break is a wound, a pain. But the wound is necessary: most of mankind suffers from hereditary sleeping sickness, and victims of this sickness (entropy) must not be allowed to sleep, or it will be their final sleep, death.
The same disease often afflicts artists and writers: they sink into satiated slumber in forms once invented and twice perfected. And they lack the strength to wound themselves, to cease loving what they once loved, to leave their old, familiar apartments filled with the scent of laurel leaves and walk away into the open field, to start anew.
Of course, to wound oneself is difficult, even dangerous. But for those who are alive, living today as yesterday and yesterday as today is still more difficult.