“You sit down . . . You try to sit down at approximately the same time every day. This is how you train your unconscious to kick in for you creatively.”
“Perhaps for some men a period of violence and destruction at one time attracts them to look for something creative as a balance in another part of life.”
“I’ve come to believe that creativity is the mechanism that allows learning to seep into our being and become practice. The Asaro tribe of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea has a beautiful saying: ‘Knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle.’”
“The book has somehow to be adapted to the body, and at a venture one would say that women’s books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work. For interruptions there will always be.”
“Since no one can read, every candidate is designated by a symbol. Wisely these men choose to represent themselves with useful things - knife, bottle, matches, cooking pot.”
“Those three things - autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.”
“It seems very pretty,” she said when she had finished it, “but it’s rather hard to understand!” (You see she didn’t like to confess, even to herself, that she couldn’t make it out at all.) “Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas – only I don’t know exactly what they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate – ”
“Jess drew the way some people drank whiskey. The peace would start at the top of his muddled brain and seep down through his tired and tensed-up body. Lord, he loved to draw.”
“Order will ease your load and free your mind for greater peace, joy, and creativity. By more effectively ordering your day, you will gain a sense of control, a sense of purpose, increased productivity, an environment of creativity, and a greater focus and flow of accomplishments.”
“This is the challenge of creative thinking—as you open the spiritual channels of your mind, God can download divine, creative thoughts into your brain. Ask God to enlarge your capacity for thinking, to take the limits off.”
“Many people suffer because of the false supposition on which they have based their lives. That supposition is that there should be no fear or loneliness, no confusion or doubt. But these sufferings can only be dealt with creatively when they are understood as wounds integral to our human condition. ”
“Nothing so bolsters our self-confidence and reconciles us with ourselves as the continuous ability to create; to see things grow and develop under our hand, day in, day out.”
“Nothing so bolsters our self-confidence and reconciles us with ourselves as the continuous ability to create; to see things grow and develop under our hand, day in, day out.”
“Expectation. That is the true soul of art. If you can give a man more than he expects, then he will laud you his entire life. If you can create an air of anticipation and feed it properly, you will succeed.”
“The atmosphere was heady. One could find a party with relative ease on any day of the week. However, it wouldn’t be fair to say that the Lost Generation was hedonistic or irresponsible. As a whole, the various writers of the group maintained high levels of productivity and creativity throughout the turbulent twenties.”
″‘I meant by ‘impenetrability’ that we’ve had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you’d mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don’t mean to stop here all the rest of your life.′
‘That’s a great deal to make one word mean,’ Alice said in a thoughtful tone.”
″‘What a curious helmet you’ve got!’ she said cheerfully. ‘Is that your invention too?’
The Knight looked down proudly at his helmet, which hung from the saddle. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but I’ve invented a better one than that – like a sugar loaf. When I used to wear it, if I fell off the horse, it always touched the ground directly. So I had a very little way to fall, you see – But there was the danger of falling into it, to be sure. That happened to me once – and the worst of it was, before I could get out again, the other White Knight came and put it on. He thought it was his own helmet.‘”
“She was out of the room in a moment, and ran down stairs – or, at least, it wasn’t exactly running, but a new invention for getting down stairs quickly and easily, as Alice said to herself. She just kept the tips of her fingers on the hand-rail, and floated gently down without even touching the stairs with her feet: then she floated on through the hall, and would have gone straight out at the door in the same way, if she hadn’t caught hold of the door-post.”
“‘Think about it, Cath. That’s what makes a god—or a mother. There’s nothing more intoxicating than creating something from nothing. Creating something from yourself.’”
“Forward-thinking teachers and school administrators across the country are creating a whole range of alternatives to cookie-cutter teaching and evaluation methods, such as the use of student portfolios and exhibitions in addition to conventional exams to assess students’ progress.”
“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”
“Human will becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is wholly God’s, and this is one of the many senses in which he that loses his soul shall find it”
Sometimes the right person tells the right story at the right moment, and through a combination of luck and design, a creative expression gains new force.
“But to yell at your creativity, saying, “You must earn money for me!” is sort of like yelling at a cat; it has no idea what you’re talking about, and all you’re doing is scaring it away, because you’re making really loud noises and your face looks weird when you do that.”
“Creativity is sacred, and it is not sacred. What we make matters enormously, and it doesn’t matter at all. We toil alone, and we are accompanied by spirits. We are terrified, and we are brave. Art is a crushing chore and a wonderful privilege. Only when we are at our most playful can divinity finally get serious with us. Make space for all these paradoxes to be equally true inside your soul, and I promise—you can make anything.”
“Whenever the students had free time, they were permitted to go to the Lightlbulb Lab in the back of the classroom. They expressed their ideas creatively through drawing and writing. Lilly went often. She had a lot of ideas. ”
There were some things I liked about this, and some I didn’t. I love that Clarice Bean is a bookworm, addicted to the Ruby Redford series about a young girl who lives a secret double life as an international spy. I liked the creativity in the text layout, meandering about the page as Clarice’s thoughts meander during class.
A number of people see the Cheshunt school’s headmaster, Mr Karle (“the Kraken”) as a representation of Hitler. In a quote on the book’s front flyleaf Terry Lane is reported to have called The Gathering “a dark, grim allegory of fascism”.