Conor O'Driscoll

When I noted that he was a sponge for quotations, he turned grave and said, “I’m not a religious person, but I think I’ve concocted my own book of hymns.”

At Summerhill, play belongs to the child. We do not dress up learning situations so that the play will be “productive”, we do not look on and evaluate what they might learn form this or that game. Our children just play — and they can do it pretty well all day if they want to.

“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on,” he wrote. “Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very interesting.” 

The word ‘love’ is most often defined as a noun, yet all the more astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb.

One of the things white people gave us when they gave us integration was full access to the tormenting reality of desire, and the expectation of constant consumption.

Wounded white people frequently can cover up their wounds, because they have greater access to material power.

Many think of punk as a style or a category or a thing, but it’s much more interesting if you think of it as a process, a way of doing things, a disposition, a spirit. (This is probably true of all movements.)

The question is not what you look at, but what you see.

Start by learning to recognize what interests you. Most people have been taught that what they notice doesn’t matter, So they never learn how to notice, Not even what interests them. Or they assume that the world has been completely pre-noticed, Already sifted and sorted and categorized By everyone else, by people with real authority. And so they write about pre-authorized subjects in pre-authorized language.

Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

They are embossed on every song that was a hit that summer, in every novel I read during and after his stay, on anything from the smell of rosemary on hot days to the frantic rattle of the cicadas in the afternoon—smells and sounds I’d grown up with and known every year of my life until then but that had suddenly turned on me and acquired an inflection forever colored by the events of that summer.

The secret of The Old Farmer’s Almanac: pay attention. Pay attention to the sky, and the winds, and the tides, and the number of acorns on the ground in the fall, and what the animals are doing, and which way the birds are flying. Pay attention.

I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference, because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something — a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important.

One day it occurred to me that everything doesn’t happen for a reason. What it is is that everything happens, and then we assign a reason to it.

To Love Someone Long-Term Is to Attend a Thousand Funerals of the People They Used to Be

Offline we exist by default; online we have to post our way into selfhood.

My pictures are collages. I didn’t invent the collage. […] Many children have done collages at home or in their classrooms. In fact, some children have said to me, “Oh, I can do that.” I consider that the highest compliment.

For Annie, who also knows the days to be gods

“The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals,” Heschel writes. “Jewish ritual may be characterized as the art of significant forms in time, as architecture of time.”

We have invented the weekend, but the dark cloud of old taboos still hangs over the holiday, and the combination of the secular with the holy leaves us uneasy. This tension only compounds the guilt that many of us continue to feel about not working, and leads to the nagging feeling that our free time should be used for some purpose higher than having fun. We want leisure, but we are afraid of it, too.

“Cherish, conserve, consider, create”: you could do worse than to live your life according to the principles propounded by the composer Lou Harrison.

It seems to me that the most pleasing thing you can find yourself saying in a conversation is something you haven’t said before.

I think that all the people who worry so much about the children are really worrying about themselves, about keeping their world together and getting the children to help them do it, getting the children to agree that it is indeed a world. Each new generation of children has to be told: ‘This is a world, this is what one does, one lives like this.’ Maybe our constant fear is that a generation of children will come along and say: ‘This is not a world, this is nothing, there’s no way to live at all.’

There will always be pigeons in books and in museums, but these are effigies and images, dead to all hardships and to all delights. They know no urge of seasons; they feel no kiss of sun, no lash of wind and weather. They live forever by not living at all.

The most effective learning looks inefficient; it looks like falling behind.