Tuesday 22 May 2012

Brain Pickings

I was put onto Brain Pickings by Andy Conway, the Screenwriter moderator on Shootingpeople and it really is rather good.  It advertises itself as:

...a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness, culling and curating cross-disciplinary curiosity-quenchers, and separating the signal from the noise to bring you things you didn’t know you were interested in until you are.

It's a first class site with some excellent articles so do check it out and sign up for the newsletter.



What I felt like sharing though was a quote on the subject of why we read and write from Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life:

"Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselves or life, our buoyancy is restored. We are given a shot at dancing with, or at least clapping along with, the absurdity of life, instead of being squashed by it over and over again. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.”