Quote of the Day -- bell hooks

Many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.

-- bell hooks

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According to her New York Times obituary, bell hooks' incisive, wide-ranging writing on gender and race helped push feminism beyond its white, middle-class worldview to include the voices of Black and working-class women. Her work included over 30 books, and encompassed literary criticism, children’s fiction, self-help, memoir and poetry, and it tackled not just subjects like education, capitalism and American history but also love and friendship. She died in December 2021 at the age of 69.

Quote of the Day -- Ingrid Fetell Lee

... most creative endeavors are an exercise of craft, not genius. The initial concept matters, but it’s the slow accumulation of progress that happens when you edit, revise, leave it alone and come back with fresh eyes, that actually makes it great. The first draft of a great idea is almost never better than the tenth draft of a so-so idea.

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Ingrid Fetell Lee (age well hidden but she's in her 40's) is a Brooklyn-based designer and writer whose work focuses on the way that design affects our health and happiness. As founder of The Aesthetics of Joy and in her role as IDEO fellow, she empowers people to find more joy in daily life through design (and she has a good publicist who writes this stuff). She is the  author of Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness (on my TBR).

Quote of the Day -- Joyce Carol Oates

Why some things—a word, a glance, a scene glimpsed from a window, a random memory, a fragrance, a conversational anecdote, a fragment of music, or of a dream—have the power to stimulate us to intense creativity while most others do not, we are unable to say.

-- Joyce Carol Oates

Quote of the Day -- Seth Godin

People who have trouble coming up with good ideas, if they're telling you the truth, will tell you they don't have very many bad ideas. But people who have plenty of good ideas, if they're telling the truth, will say they have even more bad ideas. So the goal isn't to get good ideas; the goal is to get bad ideas. Because once you get enough bad ideas, then some good ones have to show up.

-- Seth Godin