Tag: Quotes

  • I Think, Therefore I Can

    A couple of weeks ago, I (Laura) gave a talk in Leeds as part of the Pedalling Ideas festival, an event which celebrated bike-based ideas. I was there to represent The Adventure Syndicate, an organisation which aims to encourage people, particularly women and girls, to achieve more. Our mission is to inspire, enable and encourage,…

  • If You Think You’re Beaten, You Are

    If you think you are beaten, you are; If you think you dare not, you don’t. If you’d like to win, but think you can’t It’s almost a cinch you won’t If you think you’ll lose, you’re lost, For out in the world we find Success begins with a fellow’s will; It’s all in the…

  • 2010 Review – Top 10 Blog Posts

    In no particular order, here are my favourite ten blog posts from this year. What do you think? What would you add? Someday, all this will be a memory* – Revolution Cycle 10 things we believe – Escape the City The Art of Artlessness: On Living Simply and Naturally* – Zen Habits Alain de Botton…

  • The Vehicle of Poets

    The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets. Christopher Morley   The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man.  Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish.  Only the bicycle remains pure in heart. Iris Murdoch   When I go biking, I repeat a mantra of the…

  • No time to turn at Beauty’s glance

    What is this life if, full of care,We have no time to stand and stare. No time to stand beneath the boughsAnd stare as long as sheep or cows. No time to see, when woods we pass,Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass. No time to see, in broad daylight,Streams full of stars, like skies…

  • And we’ll all be lonely tonight

    Post office clerks put up signs saying position closed And secretaries turn off typewriters and put on their coats Janitors padlock the gates For security guards to patrol And bachelors phone up their friends for a drink While the married ones turn on a chat show Gentlemen time please, you know we can’t serve anymore…

  • Honour the miraculousness of the ordinary (and 22 other tips for writing fiction)

    I read a great feature in the Guardian recently with hundreds of tips from authors for aspirant writers. You can read the full list here but I’ve quoted a few of my favourites below: Jonathan FranzenInteresting verbs are seldom very interesting. Elmore Leonard: Using adverbs is a mortal sinKeep your exclamation points ­under control. You…

  • In the fell clutch of circumstance

    Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.   In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.   Beyond this place of…

  • Feeding the Rat

    Wan-der-lust (noun): a strong, innate desire to rove or travel about. This is a term familiar to most people, both as a definition and as a feeling. But it doesn’t cut it for me. I think there’s a better one. Wanderlust is primarily about “the travel bug” but the magnetic force that acts on me…

  • Life, true life

    “It was during that performance of Rigoletto that opera imprinted itself on Katsumi Hosokawa, a message written on the pink undersides of his eyelids that he read to himself while he slept. Many years later, when everything was business, when he worked harder than anyone in a country whose values are structured on hard work,…

  • Gideon Mack was running

    “In Israel young fanatics with explosives strapped to their bodies were wiping themselves and busloads of hated strangers off the planet; insect species were being extinguished every five minutes in the Amazon forest; military coups were being bloodily launched in Africa; dams were being built in China, making tens of thousands homeless; but in Keldo…