Conor O'Driscoll

You are being paid to make decisions, and as far as whether to cut or not, the editor is actually making twenty-four decisions a second: “No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Yes!”

a joy that wasn’t and isn’t and won’t be words.

Consider a sculptor attacking granite with hand tools. Granite resists such attack violently; it is a hard material, so hard it is difficult to do anything bad in it. It is not easy to do something good, but it is extremely difficult to do something bad. Plastilina, though, is a different matter. In this spineless material it is extraordinarily easy to do something bad–one can do any imaginable variety of bad without half trying. The material itself puts up no resistance, and whatever discipline there is the artist must be strong enough to provide.

Corita became known as the “joyous revolutionary.”

History has shown that virtually anything from everyday life can be used as a source for our image making. Campbell’s Soup is a long way from the caves of Lascaux, but we still are painting what we see. Look at today’s landscape–billboards, freeway systems, electric power plants (most beautiful at night), and so forth–to see how they can become art.

I had a wonderful art teacher, she said. She didn’t teach us how to draw or paint so much as she taught us to care.

I think celebrations are always meant to instruct and inspire, to empower people to use their own creative skills through images and ritual to action.

It does not matter that this is all familiar territory–the same house, the same rug and chair. To the child, the journey of this particular day, with its special light and sound, has never been made before.

One purpose of art is to alert people to things they might have missed.

The artist has so much love to give back to the universe that it spills over, and the fallen drops become ‘works of art.’ It is love in another form.

The commonplace is not worthless, there is simply lots of it.

The root meaning of the word art is to fit together and we all do this every day. Not all of us are painters but we are all artists. Each time we fit things together we are creating–whether it is to make a loaf of bread, a child, a day.

There are mornings when the sun pours in and the sky is that kind of blue you know you’ve never seen before. And the quality of the white clouds floating and the geraniums blooming indoors and the floor and carpets and all the colors and shapes are new too. These moments are very intense because you can hardly believe that this beauty exists every day when you are going faster or you have your back turned to it.

The intuitive appeal of a scientific theory has to do with how well its metaphors fit one’s experience.

A good parent creates an adult who can make his own choices, even disastrous choices.

Each generation of human beings both grows up in and creates a slightly different world than the generation that preceded them. It’s a mess. But it’s a good mess, a mess that allows human beings to thrive in a staggering array of constantly changing environments.

Every generation or so the idea of guiltless sex reemerges with a hopeful new name—free love or open marriage or now polyamory—and with the same hopeless old problems of insecurity and jealousy.

In one of those bitter, teeth-gritting ironies, it turned out that moms used generics even when they were trying to combat sexism. Saying “Girls can drive trucks” still implies that girls all belong in the same category with the same deep, underlying essence.

It turns out instead that even the youngest children look below the surface to try to understand the deeper essences of the things around them. In fact, when children make mistakes, it’s often because they are looking too hard for essences when there are actually none to be found.

None of my children has replicated my life. Instead, each of them has created a uniquely valuable life of his own—a life that is a mash-up of my values and traditions, the values and traditions of the other people who have taught and cared for them, the inventions of their generation, and their own inventions.

Parents in these communities slow down and exaggerate their own actions, and act in a way that makes it easy for the children to join in. But they don’t design special actions or do special things in order to teach the children—they act in order to get things done, and the children learn at the same time.

Passing on rituals seems to be as important in cultural evolution as passing on technologies. In fact, you might argue that rituals are technologies.

Studies by the neuroscientist B. J. Casey suggest that adolescents are reckless not because they underestimate risks but because they overestimate rewards—or, rather, find rewards more rewarding than adults do.

The evolutionary theorist Eva Jablonka has suggested that the human mind is more like a hand than a Swiss Army knife. A human hand isn’t designed to do any one thing in particular. But it is an exceptionally flexible and effective device for doing many things, including things we might never have imagined.

The fact that the children were so sensitive to the teacher’s intentions made them stupid, or at least stupider than they would have been otherwise. Or to put it another way, their intelligence about teaching, and their cleverness in figuring out just what the teacher wanted, made them worse at actually learning.