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The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.
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writing
skill
quality
writers
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Ray Bradbury |
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Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.
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literature
sacredness
quality
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Günter Grass |
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Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who's bound to have some characteristic of quality.
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work
philosophy
quality
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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The key then to attaining this higher level of intelligence is to make our years of study qualitatively rich. We don't simply absorb information - we internalize it and make it our own by finding some way to put this knowledge to practical use.
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internalization
practical-application
quality
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Robert Greene |
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"You've got to live right, too. It's the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That's the way all the experts do it. The making of a painting or the fixing of a motorcycle isn't separate from the rest of your existence. If you're a sloppy thinker the six days of the week you aren't working on your machine, what trap avoidance, what gimmicks, can make you all of a sudden sharp on the seventh? It all goes together ... The real cycle you're working in is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be "out there" and the person that appears to be "in here" are not two separate things. They grow toward Qaulity or fall away from Qaulity together."
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quality
zen
perfect
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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We don't value craftsmanship anymore! All we value is ruthless efficiency, and I say we deny our own humanity that way! Without appreciation for grace and beauty, there's no pleasure in creating things and no pleasure in having them! Our lives are made drearier, rather than richer! How can a person take pride in his work when skill and care are considered luxuries! We're not machines! We have a human need for craftsmanship!
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creating
human
beauty
care
handmade
quantity
craftsmanship
efficiency
grace
art
skill
quality
value
machines
pleasure
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Bill Watterson |
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But I have never had the privilege of unhappiness in Happy Valley. California is about the good life. So a bad life there seems so much worse than a bad life anywhere else. Quality is an obsession there--good food, good wine, good movies, music, weather, cars. Those sound like the right things to shoot for, but the never-ending quality quest is a lot of pressure when you're uncertain and disorganized and, not least, broker than broke. Some afternoons a person just wants to rent Die Hard, close the curtains, and have Cheerios for lunch.
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humor
quality
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Sarah Vowell |
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International business, once allowed to stalk uncontrolled, killed the local, the small, the quirky.
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economics
quality
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Alexander McCall Smith |
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As long as one egg looks pretty much like another, all the chickens like chicken, and beef beef, the substitution of quantity for quality will go unnoticed by most consumers, but it is becoming increasingly apparent to anyone with an electron microscope or a mass spectrometer that, truly, this is not the same food.
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organic
quality
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Michael Pollan |
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The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again.
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conventionality
repetitiveness
quality
standards
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Pauline Kael |
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In a strange way, I envied the quality of Morrie's time even as I lamented its diminishing supply. Why did we bother with all the distractions we did? .. give up days and weeks of our lives, addicted to someone else's drama.
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ill
live
life
others
envy
quality
drama
dying
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Mitch Albom |
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"May, will you please, kindly DIG it," he remembered one of them saying, "and hold up on all those wonderful seven-dollar questions? If you got to ask what IS it all the time, you'll never get time to KNOW."
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groovy
quality
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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You can't really think hard about what you're doing and listen to the radio at the same time. Maybe they didn't see their job as having anything to do with hard thought, just wrench twiddling.
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care
music
work-environment
observations
distractions
excellence
habits
quality
consciousness
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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The great strength she had used in the old days to conquer and subdue, to win her will and to defend her way, seemed now a power but to protect the suffering and uphold the weak, and this she did, not alone in hovels but in the brilliant court and world of fashion, for there she found suffering and weakness also, all the more bitter and sorrowful since it dared not cry aloud.
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suffering
inspirational-quotes
succor
quality
mercy
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Frances Hodgson Burnett |
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Tell about the quality of light coming in through your window. Jump in and write. Don't worry if it is night and your curtains are closed or you would rather write about the light up north--just write. Go for ten minutes, fifteen, a half hour.
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quality
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Natalie Goldberg |
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Many great ideas are not unique. They only become unique when the men who have the wherewithal actually to implement them come together.
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opportunity
truth
idea
implement
meet
occur
quality
make
ideas
unique
creativity
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Robin Hobb |
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Her father had always said that a man could be fairly judged by the quality of his allies and that of his enemies.
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worthiness
quality
judgement
enemies
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Jim Butcher |
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He singled out aspects of Quality such as unity, vividness, authority, economy, sensitivity, clarity, emphasis, flow, suspense, brilliance, precision, proportion, depth and so on; kept each of these as poorly defined as Quality itself, but demonstrated them by the same class reading techniques. He showed how the aspect of Quality called unity, the hanging-togetherness of a story, could be improved with a technique called an outline. The authority of an argument could be jacked up with a technique called footnotes, which gives authoritative reference. Outlines and footnotes are standard things taught in all freshman composition classes, but now as devices for improving Quality they had a purpose. And if a student turned in a bunch of dumb references or a sloppy outline that showed he was just fulfilling an assignment by rote, he could be told that while his paper may have fulfilled the letter of the assignment it obviously didn't fulfill the goal of Quality, and was therefore worthless.
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learning
outlines
what-is-quality
how-to-write
research
rhetoric
writing-craft
quality
writing-process
teaching
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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Hammett used to be irritated by that and would answer that nobody ever deliberately wrote a potboiler, you just did the best you could and woke up to find it good or no good.
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books
potboilers
dashiell-hammett
william-faulkner
quality
sanctuary
writers
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Lillian Hellman |
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I never saw a lad, page or prince, so eager to learn to do a thing right.
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hard-work
quality
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Gail Carson Levine |
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"But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing...and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. There was no identification with the job. No saying, "I am a mechanic." At 5 P.M. or whenever their eight hours were in, you knew they would cut it off and not have another thought about their work. They were already trying not to have any thoughts about their work on the job."
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work
automaton
employees
mindless
mindfulness
mindset
sheep
perspective
quality
consciousness
awareness
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Robert M. Pirsig |
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People scooped up these tabloids, devoured their gossip.. But now, for some reason, I found myself thinking about Morrie whenever I read anything silly or mindless. I kept picturing him there, in the house with the Japanese maple.. counting his breath, squeezing out every moment with his loved ones, while I spent so many hours on things that meant absolutely nothing to me personally.
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senseless
ill
live
life
love
quality
moment
gossip
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Mitch Albom |