Contrapposto by Dave Eggers, r. Aug. 2026

Page 8 Cricket thought he might go outside and fill the can from the hose, but it was January, no more than ten degrees outside, the sky frozen and white, the trees terrified and bare.

Page 10 “You are contained,” Silas said. “You can visit with your mother, or spend time with me. Or you can go into the world outside and look at its endlessness. And always you have the life you can conjure on your own. You can produce beauty there in your notebooks, from scratch. And harmony. Chaos outside, order on your paper. Right?”

Page 15 Cricket looked at her and thought he recognized her. A grade above was another world. He saw those kids as he saw adults, teachers, cops. But she did look familiar. The boy, though, he didn’t know. He might be from out of town, a far more dangerous category of teenager. A teenager from out of town was capable of anything—even murder.

Page 28 But he circled and ovaled for a minute or so, and though his lines were more tentative and did not have Oana’s flourish and accuracy, in the end he created a general shape not unlike hers. He blinked rapidly at his drawing. It was, already, unlike anything he’d ever done. It was much like hers, and it was like the objects in front of him, and yet it was somehow his.

Page 36 He convulsed, and she massaged his head with her hands, round and round like a planetary storm.

Page 52 Jed had been held back, then kicked out and now attended the Boys Academy, a gloomy campus on the edge of town where the most wayward and unpromising young men went. Jed’s father was a cop.

Page 94 “I’m really glad you could come today,” she said, and put her hand on his. It was very warm and his childhood ended. Now he was a young man who women touched suggestively at the track.

Page 96 He closed his book, reshelved it and left the library through the side door. The door boomed when he opened it and whispered when it closed.

Page 96 Outside, the air was cold and crisp and hit him like love. The ancient trees stood over him, nodding in quiet tribute. When he got back to work, the Whistlestop smelled of cigarette smoke and snow. Jed was sitting at one of the dinettes with a woman of about twenty-two.

Page 135 He drew the log truthfully and stayed until dark. When he was finished he examined his work, feeling like the day could not have been spent in any better way. The day was gone but the drawing would remain. Art was remembering, documenting. Spending a day recording a day and thus freezing time.

Page 157 ...and the surfaces were alive, were untamed and varied and rewarded close inspection.

Page 166 “I recognize that many among you are not draftsmen. You are not interested in rendering the world as you see it. That is fine. The art world, in the last century, has made room for those who cannot draw. But I would ask that you, that we, resist a new, paradoxical tyranny wherein those without technical skill terrorize those who possess it. When we hound certain kinds of artists out of this school—hound out the most naturally and classically skilled, lord help us!—we engage in a kind of upside-down artistic fascism that reminds me of Pol Pot purging his country of intellectuals.”

Page 168 “Beauty justifies itself!” Carpenter yelled. “There is a perfectly inverse relationship between talent and the need to explain itself. The artist’s only rational response to ‘Why did you make this?’ is ‘Because I wanted to’ or ‘Because it felt right.’ Everything else is sophistry!”

Page 168 You have been fed the lie that intent is achievement. It is not. You have been fed the lie that explaining your ideas is the same as realizing them. It is not. You have been fed the lie that people enjoy looking at theories and gags and pranks. They do not. You have been fed the lie that your peers’ success means your failure. It is not. You have been fed the lie that greatness emerges from cruelty. This has never been true and never will be true. These group crits have no purpose and accomplish nothing. They kill the heroes and reward the scavengers. They must end.”

Page 178 As professors, they’re forced to talk, which leads to pronouncements, which lead to theories, and theories become rigid and quickly ridiculous.”

Page 189 And I had an anthropologist friend—he’d studied people all over the world for fifty years. He said the happiest people, in every society and every era, were those who created things, but without ambition. The people who make belts, vases, toys. You bring something new into the world, like a god, but without the human need to be recognized for it. Is that happiness?”

Page 244 The idea of creation was delicious, pure pleasure, while the execution of that idea was so often an unendurable slog ending in tragic disappointment. So rarely could he realize the image in his mind, and even if he could, what would he do with it? Show it in an empty gallery next to the work of Peter-James Flemming?

Page 247 Shit, what if that happens to us? Every day in art should be like running down a hill, arms waving, shrieking. Not sitting at a desk writing down auction prices. Are they nice to you at least?”

Page 253 “And I haven’t done anything yet. At thirty everyone judges you, right? You need something to have happened before thirty. Otherwise you’re late and worthless and all is lost.”

Page 276 When we create well, the world is good, he thought. We’ve wrestled amorphous ideas into knowable shapes, we’ve improved—even glorified—flesh on canvas, we’ve made something greater than ourselves.

Page 343 But rarely did anything go to plan, and it was even rarer to have a work of art received as hoped. And so what was left? What was left, what was the only refuge, was the simple joy in creation. In making something appear. But Kyle was not joyful. And Olympia was not joyful. And the workers in the studio were there to pay for their lives outside the studio. And the billionaires who bought Kyle’s work were investors, not lovers. So together, everyone involved, from Cricket on up—they were all engaged in a kind of factory that made beautiful, unnecessary things that meant very little to anyone who made them.

Page 360 She was a muscular, angular being—a practical person

Page 369 It was only in seeing friends, also on their joined journey of decline, that he saw aging’s wretched work.

Page 381 God, look at this. What do you think: Is there just enough beauty in the world, or too much? You have only two choices.” “Too much,” he said. “Good answer,” she said, and stood in the water, motionless for a long while.

Page 409 The quiet and sacred world of now that he’d tended had been punctured, and the past was rushing through, filling the room.

Page 413 “And yet it didn’t matter,” she said. “All these things we did, if only we knew how little any one of them mattered. You could do a thousand things in a life.”

The Practice by Seth Godin, r. Aug. 2021

p. 22 Our passion is simply the work we've trusted ourselves to do.... The trap is this: only after we do the difficult work does it become our calling. Only after we trust the process does it become our passion. "Do what you love" is for amateurs. "Love what you do" is the mantra for professionals.

p. 33 It's not important that the kids developed their musical skills when they were eleven. It's important that they developed the habit of identity. When they looked in the mirror, they saw themselves as musicians, as artists, as people who had committed to a journey.

p. 64 Generosity is the most direct way to find the practice. Generosity subverts resistance by focusing the work on someone else. Generosity means that we don't have to seek reassurance for the self, but can instead concentrate on serving others. It activates a different part of our brain and gives us a more meaningful way forward. People don't want to be selfish, and giving in to resistance when you're doing generous work feels selfish.

p. 68 Positive people are more likely to enjoy the practice. They're not wasting any time experiencing failure in advance.

Tim Ferriss Podcast with Seth Godin (#476), l. Jan. 2021

"Once we know how the trick is done, it’s simply a trick. The magic evaporates and in the case of great writing, great customer service, great theater, the first time you experience it, the unexpected moment when lights turn on for you, I want to call that magic .... I believe that now that we’ve got AI and robots and offshoring and the rest, the work that’s left for us is the work to create magic."

"Marshall Sahlins wrote a breakthrough book in the ’60s called Stone Age Economics. It is about what it was like to be a caveman. It turns out that cavemen, who in my view were wearing these horrible Flintstones-like clothes and barely surviving, only worked three hours a day. They spent the rest of their time being present and alive and with their family, and all the things people say they want to do more of. What’s fascinating to me about that is lots of the people that you and I know, who go to work and just dig it out day after day, don’t do it because they need more money. They are seeking some sort of status, some sort of emotional engagement, some sort of energy, but they forget along the way, because they signed up for this other game, that there’s the game one can play of, “Wow that really was cool what I just made. That fills me with joy. I just did something generous. I just connected with someone at an elemental level.” But they’re too busy playing somebody else’s game to play that game."

https://tim.blog/2020/10/29/seth-godin-the-practice-transcript/

Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham, r. May 2018

p. 49 The feeling of apartness from others comes to most with puberty, but it is not always developed to such a degree as to make the difference between the individual and his fellows noticeable to the individual. It is such as he, as little conscious of himself as the bee in a hive, who are the lucky in life, for they have the best chance of happiness: their activities are shared by all, and their pleasures are only pleasures because they are enjoyed in common.

p. 88 The school seemed less of a prison when he knew that before Easter he would be free from it for ever. His heart danced within him. That evening in chapel he looked round at the boys, standing according to their forms, each in his due place, and he chuckled with satisfaction at the thought that soon we would never see them again. It made him regard them almost with a friendly feeling.

p. 121 It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded.

p. 142 He had read many descriptions of love, and he felt in himself none of that uprush of emotion which novelists described; he was not carried off his feet in wave upon wave of passion; nor was Miss Wilkinson the ideal: he had often pictured to himself the great violet eyes and the alabaster skin of some lovely girl, and he had thought of himself burying his face in the rippling masses of her auburn hair. He could not imagine himself burying his face in Miss Wilkinson's hair, it always struck him as a little sticky.

p. 207 "I do not attach any exaggerated importance to my poetical works. Life is there to be lived rather than to be written about."

p. 210 "I have nothing to do with others, I am only concerned with myself. I take advantage of the fact that the majority of mankind are led by certain rewards to do things which directly or indirectly tend to my convenience."

p. 224 It grew so hot that it was almost impossible to sleep at night. The heat seemed to linger under the trees as though it were a material thing. They did not wish to leave the starlit night, and the three of them would sit on the terrace of Ruth Chalice's room, silent, hour after hour, too tired to talk any more, but in voluptuous enjoyment of the stillness. They listened to the murmur of the river.

p. 242 "What happens to our work afterwards is unimportant; we have got all we could out of it while we were doing it."

p. 243 Of late Philip had been captivated by an idea that since one had only one life it was important to make a success of it, but he did not count success by the acquiring of money or the achieving of fame; he did not quite know yet what he meant by it, perhaps variety of experience and the making the most of his abilities.

p. 248 "Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five. Without an adequate income half the possibilities of life are shut off."

p. 321 "Why do you read then?" "Partly for pleasure, because it's a habit and I'm just as uncomfortable if I don't read is if I don't smoke, and partly to know myself. When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me; I've got out of the book all that's any use to me, and I can't get anything more if I read it a dozen times."

p. 384 They thought him reasonable and praised his common sense; but he knew that his placid expression was no more than a mask, assumed unconsciously, which acted like the protective coloring of butterflies; and himself was astonished at the weakness of his will. It seemed to him that he was swayed by every light emotion, as though he were a leaf in the wind, and when passion seized him he was powerless. He had no self-control. He merely seemed to possess it because he was so indifferent to many of the things which moved other people.

p. 405 "You talk glibly of giving up drinking, but it's the only thing I've got left now. What do you think life would be to me without it? Can you understand the happiness I get out of my absinthe? I yearn for it; and when I drink it I savour every drop, and afterwards I feel my soul swimming in ineffable happiness. It disgusts you. You are a puritan and in your heart you despise sensual pleasures. Sensual pleasures are the most violent and the most exquisite. I am a man blessed with vivid senses, and I have indulged them with all my soul. I have to pay the penalty now, and I am ready to pay." [dying of cirrhosis]

p. 422 "May I see what you're reading?" asked Philip, who could never pass a book without looking at it.

p. 432 "Perhaps religion is the best school of morality. It is like one of those drugs you gentlemen use in medicine which carries another in solution: it is of no efficacy in itself, but enables the other to be absorbed. You take your morality because it is combined with religion; you lose the religion and tho morality stays behind. A man is more likely to be a good man if he has learned goodness through the love of God than through a perusal of Herbert Spencer."

p. 524 His insignificance was turned to power, and he felt himself suddenly equal with the cruel fate which had seemed to persecute him; for, if life was meaningless, the world was robbed of its cruelty.

p. 524-525 [photo] Persian rug pattern analogy - weaving your own pattern, simple or complex, is the meaning of life, for beauty's sake.

P. 601 Philip had never been able to surmount what he acknowledged was a defect in his resolute desire for a well-ordered life, and that was his passion for living in the future; and no sooner was he settled in his work at the hospital than he had busied himself with arrangements for his travels.