Last year was awesome for books. In 2016 the campus library kept sending up the Book Signal nonstop, and I kept bursting through the doors like Batman to save more books than I could gracefully carry. (Batman adopts Robins, I adopt paper thoughts – it’s a sidekick collecting thing.) This past year I focused on a few different arts, short story anthologies & criticisms, musical performance, etc. because I like to connect parallel ideas from separate disciplines in order to determine relevance and application with regard to my own (for fun).

Summary Of Paper Thoughts From 2016:

Writing is art, art expresses life – the ability to chase, harness and command that expression begins with curiosity, matures through imagination, and has no finish line.

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And Then, You Act: Making Art in an Unpredictable World (2007) by Anne Bogart: “Art reimagines time and space, and its success can be measured by the extent to which an audience can not only access that world but becomes engaged to the point where they understand something about themselves that they did not know before.”

“Description is prose. Expression is poetry.”

“The more you know, the better you can imagine.”

“Attention is an action and it can be learned and practiced. It is a way of touching the world.”

Carl Sagan: “Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.”

The Lee Strasberg Notes (2010): “In our work, we develop the actor’s concentration and power of observation. We train the imagination, senses and emotions, helping the actor to expand the ability to conceive more than the ordinary. Our training nurtures creativity, which is the highest material that can be used for art.”

The Fantastic in Literature (1976) by Eric S. Rabkin: “The fantastic does more than extend experience; the fantastic contradicts perspectives.”

“The fantastic reveals not only our deepest fears, but our greatest aspirations; not only our hidden shames, but also out finest hopes.”

Ernest Hemingway: “Write hard and clear about what hurts.”

Coming to Terms with the Short Story (1983) by Susan Lohafer: “Size of action, not kind of action; choice of manner, not choice of intention. These are what make the difference.”

Maya Angelou: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Leonidas Kavakos: “Music is about devotion, and about knowing when to be free.”

Duke Ellington: “The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.”

Paul Desmond: “Writing is a lot like jazz. It can be learned but it can’t be taught.”

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Haruki Murakami: “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein: “If you cannot say it, point to it.”

Jack Kerouac: “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”

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Anonymous: “When you really pay attention, everything is your teacher.”

Albert Einstein: “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.”

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Here’s To 2017!

Don’t stop reading, writing, acting, playing, listening, learning, loving, dreaming, creating, believing and never ever stop being passionately curious.