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“Your current situation = the life expectations you have accepted as completed, unless you change your comfort zone to create a better life.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“People wonder when you're allowed to call yourself a writer. I think maybe the answer is when you recognize that is work." - Nina MacLaughlin, 'With Compliments”
― Manjula Martin, Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living

“I can’t overstate how little I knew about myself at 22, or how little I’d thought about what I was doing. When I graduated from college I genuinely believed that the creative life was the apex of human existence, and that to work at an ordinary office job was a betrayal of that life, and I had to pursue that life at all costs. Management consulting, law school, med school, those were fine for other people â€� I didn’t judge! â€� but I was an artist. I was super special. I was sparkly. I would walk another path.

And I would walk it alone. That was another thing I knew about being an artist: You didn’t need other people. Other people were a distraction. My little chrysalis of genius was going to seat one and one only.”
― Lev Grossman

“Bird of the sky
still bound to the earth,
soaring to unimaginable heights
yet returning to perch in the willow.
Death is near, always near
and so...is life
even in the ashes.
Rise Up Phoenix.
Live. Fly. Create!”
― Michele Jennae

“Art lies in the moment of encounter: we meet ourselves and we meet our self-expression. We become original because we become something specific, an origin from which work flows.”
― Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

“To choose to be alone is to bait the trap, to create a space the demons cannot resist entering. And that's the good news; the demons that enter can be named, written about, and tamed through the miracle of the healing word, the miracle of art, the miracle of silence.”
― Fenton Johnson, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life

“We were in Julie’s room one night, my eldest daughter and I, maybe a decade ago now. I wanted to show her how the canvas painting she had carefully labored over for her little sister's Christmas gift was framed and hung on the wall.

I said, gazing at her masterpiece with no small amount of motherly pride, “Now it looks like a real work of art�.

Bella looked at me quizzically, wondering yet again how her mother could possibly understand so little about the world.

“Mama, every time you make something, or draw something, or paint something, it is already real art. There is no such thing as art that is not real�

And so I said that she was right, and didn’t it look nice, and once again, daughter became guru and mother became willing student.

Which is, I sometimes think, the way it was meant to be.

~~~~~

art is always real.
all of it.
even the stuff you don’t understand.
even the stuff you don’t like.
even the stuff that you made that you would be embarrassed to show your best friend

that photo that you took when you first got your DSLR, when you captured her spirit perfectly but the focus landed on her shoulder?

still art.

the painting you did last year the first time you picked up a brush, the one your mentor critiqued to death?

it’s art.

the story you are holding in your heart and so desperately want to tell the world?

definitely art.

the scarf you knit for your son with the funky messed up rows?

art. art. art.

the poem scrawled on your dry cleaning receipt at the red light.

the dress you want to sew.

the song you want to sing.

the clay you’ve not yet molded.

everything you have made

or will one day make

or imagine making in your wildest dreams.

it’s all real, every last bit.
because there is no such thing
as art that is not real.”
― Jeanette LeBlanc

“There has to be something other than keeping busy that gives human life value, because our society so often functions as if ‘productivityâ€� and/or ‘usefulnessâ€� are the measures of human value, and â€� particularly for artists â€� this is deeply problematic. We shouldn’t given in.”
― Tasha Golden

“I had to slow down. If I was going to listen to Venice properly I needed to hear the cadence of the place. I needed to stand still. <...> I thought of Whitman observing the parade of humanity with lewd concentration. Walt had a good ear. He loved opera and knew how to sit perfectly still.”
― Stephen Kuusisto, Eavesdropping

“Oftentimes, our hands are more creative than our minds.”
― John Joclebs Bassey, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“I will always be safe from the random hurricanes of outcome as long as I never forget where I rightfully live.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert

“Creativity is a gift to the creator not just a gift to the audience.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

“In the vast spectrum of space-time’s coeternal continuum, I am but a glint of bundled energy held together by the translucent fiber of creative consciousness. The misty dew of private thoughts that inhabit my streaky underworld briefly forms a splintery part of the glittering arena of the cosmos. In the ether-like dawn of my awakening, my minuscule arch appears intravenously injected amid the dark matter of the nightscape. Reminiscent of the morning’s dew, my comet’s tailed reflection disintegrates and dissipates without a lasting trace in the dawn of a new age. I shall never wholly cease to exist, since my filtrate potentiality â€� a trace of my essence â€� remains suspended forevermore in celestial wonderment.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“, Creativity is a choice. First and foremost you tell yourself I am a creative person, and I want to live my life creatively. That choice then opens for you the door to creative brilliance.”
― Puneet Bhatnagar

“We seek to glean physical, emotional, and spiritual sustenance from our daily chores.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“A creative person uses, not his hands, but his mind, to grab hold of what the universe has to offer.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Song of a Nature Lover