Commonplace Book

“But through continuing to show up for my writing, I’ve remembered — what we share doesn’t need to be everything, or fix everything, or solve everything, or reach everyone. It doesn’t need to be the most meaningful, the most important, the most seen or liked, the most anything. It doesn’t need to change the world. It doesn’t need to be the first or best. It doesn’t need to hold all the answers. It just needs to come from an honest, genuine place — from a felt sense of doing our best to contribute in the ways we’re able to — from the love of it — from the desire to do it — and hopefully by choosing to show up for it, it creates some tiny spark of light in our own tiny corners of the world.”

“I was born a lonely singer and I’m bound to die the same
But I’ve got to feed the hunger in my soul
And if I never have a nickel, I won’t ever die ashamed
’Cause I don’t believe that no one wants to know”

“‘We’re all on the same ball of mud and water that is heading toward a catastrophic end potentially. If we are going to solve these problems, we can’t do it alone,’ he said. ‘That’s why I think empathy is so valuable.’”

“You have to become completely disillusioned, then the truth begins to express itself in its own way”

“Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are.”

“When every time I grow into a man, chaos coming ‘round the bend.”

“All I wanted was to see stuff, filter it, feel something, and express it, and have somebody else give a shit about it.”

“The contemplation of history is more likely to inspire, if not contempt for humanity, than a somber vision of the world”

“I’ve been riding on the crest of a slump lately.”

“Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it. We live on the future: “tomorrow,” “later on,” “when you have made your way,” “you will understand when you are old enough.” Such irrelevancies are wonderful, for, after all, it’s a matter of dying. Yet a day comes when a man notices or says that he is thirty. Thus he asserts his youth. But simultaneously he situates himself in relation to time. He takes his place in it. He admits that he stands at a certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to its end. He belongs to time, and by the horror that seizes him, he recognizes his worst enemy. Tomorrow, he was longing for tomorrow, whereas everything in him ought to reject it. That revolt of the flesh is the absurd.”

“The problem with introspection is that it has no end.”

“The only words I’ve said today are ‘beer’ and ‘thank you’”

“Now there’s blood in my eyes from all this trying to see
I am deeper in then when I first came
And I have traded my gold for a pen and some ink
And I am trying hard to write my name”

“...directing movies is a little like painting a watercolor from three blocks away through a telescope with a walkie-talkie and 90 people holding the brush. And as frustrating as that sounds, it’s also thrilling and invigorating when it comes off.”

“For some of us, moments of genuine emotional resonance are rare; we are besieged by insincere forces and have become cynical and suspicious of the world. Many letters to The Red Hand Files signal a despair and anger toward the way the world operates, but they also display a deep love of beauty and a need for meaning. We want to make records that do not add to the hollow clamour that surrounds us but instead challenge people and guide them toward meaning. As I’ve said before, how we achieve this is, to an extent, out of our hands. As a band, we can only move toward what stirs us and this generally exists within the unfamiliar and unconventional. In this place, we are challenged, even unnerved, but ultimately rewarded and we hope that our fans are too.”

“If it is your destiny to be this laborer called a writer, you know that you’ve got to go to work every day, but you also know that you’re not gonna get it every day. You have to be prepared, but you really don’t command the enterprise.

Sometimes when you no longer see yourself as the hero of your own drama, you know, expecting victory after victory, and you understand deeply that this is not paradise — we somehow embrace the notion that this vale of tears, that it’s perfectable — you’re not gonna get it all straight.

I found that things got a lot easier when I no longer expected to win….

You understand that, you abandon your masterpiece, and you sink into the real masterpiece…”

“There’s a world I’m creating. A world full of monsters and heroes, Good guys and bad guys. It’s an absurd, crazy, violent world, where people rage away and God actually exists. And the more I write, the more detailed and elaborate the world becomes. And all the characters that live and die will just fade away—they’re just crooked versions of myself.”

“Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.”

“They tell me everything is gonna be all right, but I don’t even know what all right even means.”