Friday Five: Five Quotes I’ve Been Pondering Lately

Fellow quote collector Austin Kleon said it well, “The artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there's a difference: Hoarders collect indiscriminately, artists collect selectively. They only collect things that they really love.”

Quote collecting is a remarkably helpful practice for gaining better language to understand the world. Doing this for years allows me to connect the dots I’ve collected and, like all practices you commit to, compounds its value over time.

Here are a few I scribbled down from the last few weeks of reading and browsing:

1. “If you think a man draws the type of hands that you want to draw, steal ’em. Take those hands.” — Jack Kirby, King of Comics

   

2. “Life shrinks or expands according to one’s courage.” — Anaïs Nin

   

3. “Any discipline can help your writing: logic, mathematics, theology, and of course and particularly drawing. Anything that helps you to see, anything that makes you look.” — Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners

   

4. “When we meet a work of art, there’s something about that encounter that isn’t fixed in time, but rather, it unfixes time: the shaft opens. The past and present exist in the same moment.” — Ali Smith

   

5. “The more I practice the luckier I get.” — Gary Player