Conor O'Driscoll

What I’ll think is that you are clearly, maddeningly not me. It will remind me, again, that you won’t be a clone of me; you can be wonderful, a daily delight, but you won’t be someone I could have created by myself.

It’s possible to think of the camps as what happens when you cross three disciplinary institutions that all societies possess—the prison, the army, and the factory. Over the several phases of their existence, the Nazi camps took on the aspects of all of these, so that prisoners were treated simultaneously as inmates to be corrected, enemies to be combatted, and workers to be exploited.

Spend less time crafting the perfect questions/ more time listening to and for the answers.

Instead of saying ‘I don’t have time’ try saying ‘it’s not a priority,’ and see how that feels. Often, that’s a perfectly adequate explanation. I have time to iron my sheets, I just don’t want to. But other things are harder. Try it: ‘I’m not going to edit your résumé, sweetie, because it’s not a priority.’ ‘I don’t go to the doctor because my health is not a priority.’ If these phrases don’t sit well, that’s the point. Changing our language reminds us that time is a choice. If we don’t like how we’re spending an hour, we can choose differently.

If you don’t know how much you need, the default easily becomes “more.”

Here is how you write a story: you take life, cut out pretty much all of it except for like four things, make up some other stuff, and then move all the stuff around, and just in general distort the world in all kinds of ways until it makes sense to our dumb primate brains.

School is the advertising agency which makes you believe you need the society as it is.

Defining the secret of reading aloud well, he says it is “refusing to look ahead, to be in the moment”. And he says that a story puts its listener “in an eternal present”.

Forty-four years ago he was a charismatic presence, looking into the camera with piercing eyes and a frequent frown, as if constantly on the edge of disagreeing with himself.

When your kids are young, you have the wide-open opportunity to make your best life. As they get older, they’ll be much more resistant to change — they’ll want to cling to the familiar. So now is the time to think about your family culture — how you can make your daily life reflect your values.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

Children learn from their families what to love and value. Some parents have the impression that they shouldn’t impose their values on their children. But if parents don’t teach their children values, the culture will. Good parents are what Ellen Goodman called counterculture. They counter the culture with deeper, richer values.

It’s not a pretty picture: an economy where high levels of stress and anxiety are normal, where people get ill because they’ve lost control of their time, where marriages are damaged and children suffer. And yet, it’s a picture we’re invited to applaud. Our political leaders idolise “strivers” and “hard-working people”, not “chilled-out, caring dads”, for example.

Kurt taught a Chekhov story. I can’t remember the name of it. I didn’t quite understand the point, since nothing much happened. An adolescent girl is in love with this boy and that boy and another; she points at a little dog, as I recall, or maybe something else, and laughs. That’s all. There’s no conflict, no dramatic turning point or change. Kurt pointed out that she has no words for the sheer joy of being young, ripe with life, her own juiciness, and the promise of romance. Her inarticulate feelings spill into laughter at something innocuous. That’s what happened in the story. His absolute delight in that girl’s joy of feeling herself so alive was so encouraging of delight. Kurt’s enchantment taught me that such moments are nothing to sneeze at. They’re worth a story.

I want you to adore the Universe, to be easily delighted, but to be prompt as well with impatience with those artists who offend your own deep notions of what the Universe is or should be.

More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, responsible. Children need one now… It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity.

Between officially scheduled educational activities, parents look for “teachable moments” while interacting with their children. But the foundation for play is free improvisation, and nothing wrecks play like a hidden agenda from one of the participants.

Speaking of which … this afternoon … the interviewers … I do not know if I will have the time to prepare. I could try to improvise but I believe an interview needs to be prepared ahead of time to sound spontaneous.

The handles of a craftsman’s tools bespeak an absolute simplicity, the plainest forms affording the greatest range of possibilities for the user’s hand.
That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates outcome; the anticipation of outcomes guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace.

What this kind of approach requires, of course, is the willingness to meet the child as an individual. “I had an image of what Charlie ‘should’ be,” one parent says. “I wasn’t keeping my eyes focused on the real boy in front of me.”

He’s also not worried about representing something accurately; he’s actually creating something. So, if he’s drawing a tree, in his mind he’s not creating a drawing of a tree, he’s actually creating the tree. John Baldessari said that everything he knew about drawing he learned from watching children draw.

I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ’If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique.

You would suddenly find his eyes on you—very blue, very kind and gentle, and even now not stern so much as inflexible

Since people exist only in life, they must devote their time simply to being alive. Life is motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move—which is ambition, power, pleasure. What time a man can devote to morality, he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part.