More Inspirational Quotes

Be yourself. Be spontaneous. Be different. Be happy, and then everything that you are looking for will find its way to you - I don't think!

We construct our identities on the basis of attitudes towards us. Erving Goffman (paraphrase)

I realised I no longer had any friends. No friends at all. Everyone around me was on the payroll. The people I’d grown up with, my real friends, had somehow fallen by the wayside. (Barry Manilow, Daily Mail April 2011)

A job can save your life, though. If you are lost, and lonely, and wondering how you’ll ever find your way in this world, take a job. Any job. Because structure, and regular contact with regular people, and a method of contributing to a larger group are all things that help us recalibrate ourselves. Penelope Trunk, bnet.com

Thinking of making changes as taking steps is a great strategy. You can't change major things about yourself overnight. Psychologist Leslie R. Martin

And stereotypes remain: women must navigate a narrow “acceptable personality range,” as one female professor said, that is “neither too aggressive nor too soft.” Said another woman: “I am not patient and understanding. I’m busy and ambitious.” NYT on women at MIT, March 2011

There is little tolerance for true individuality in America. Middle Class Handbook

We all fictionalise ourselves in the process of creating a story out of the raw materials of our life. Neil McCormick

He had a way of giving boys a very good opinion of themselves which made them unable to measure accurately their strength and value afterwards when they were face to face with disagreeable events in life. Julian Symons, The Quest for Corvo

There is often a distance between theory and practice. Alex J. Lubet

People more often conform to type than deviate from it. Ngaio Marsh

They want to establish a home, whether for the sake of becoming parents or for the social recognition. Orthodox Israeli rabbi marrying gay men to gay women

Sex is easy to come by – it just depends how little you expect in return. Mariella Frostrup

Circumstances affect feelings, not the other way round.

Speaking like a teen-age hip-hop artist while you're in a job interview is just as bad as speaking like a U.N. delegate while you're at a keg party. ehow

The best anyone can do is to be well-informed about the particular subject and base decisions on the balance of probability. Life itself is uncertain but think how tedious it would be if it wasn't.

More here and here and here.

Atkinson Grimshaw

Atkinson Grimshaw Mercer Art Gallery,
Harrogate, Yorkshire
to 4 Sept 2011

The Guardian has trouble shedding its prejudices about “Victorians” and “pre-Raphaelites”:

The Leeds-born Victorian painter of landscape and cityscape enchantments John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836–1893) really should not be appealing to our modern eye. Heavily, painstakingly influenced by the detail of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, Grimshaw's focus reveals a near-hallucinatory clarity. Like almost all of his contemporaries (except Richard Dadd) he should have laid off the fairies, but when he concentrated on a nocturnal London Docks or gas-lit Leeds back street, he achieved a clarity of vision with his marbling of moonlight and shadow. His avoidance of realist social documentary may leave him open to accusations of escapist sentimentality, yet his common visions are almost transcendental. The effect endures more than a century later – Robert Clark.

Robert Clark must have written "Victorian.. heavy… painstaking… pre-Raphaelite… avoidance of realism… escapist sentimentality…" in his notebook before he went to Harrogate, only to have his mind blown by Grimshaw’s transcendental night pieces. They feature newly built department stores and mansion blocks, windows glowing with new-fangled gas or electricity, and the mundane figures of cab drivers, shop-girls and governesses in respectable tweeds making their way home. He was influenced as much by photography as by the pre-Raphaelites. Painter James McNeill Whistler claimed he recorded "the rain and mist, the puddles and smoky fog of late Victorian industrial England with great poetry." Grimshaw was brilliant – go.

The Guardian has a fuller account here.