Largely inspired by http://worrydream.com/#!/quotes.

The best way to measure how much you've grown isn't by inches or the number of laps you can now run around the track, or even your grade point average - though those things are important, to be sure. It's what you've done with your time, how you've chosen to spend your days, and whom you've touched this year. That, to me, is the greatest measure of success.

— Unknown

A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.

— Bob Dylan

something something olin shivers reject things machines can do

What's the greater risk - letting go of what people think or letting go of how I feel, what I believe and who I am?

— Brene Brown, src

I would like this to signal the end of "wasted angst" in my life: I’ve never regretted anything so much as having particular individual worries, in a certain sense anachronistic ones, whereas general worries, worries about our time (or at any rate those that can be reduced to such: like your problem in paying the rent, for instance) are so many and so vast and so much "my own" that I feel they are enough to fill all my "worryability" and even my interest and enjoyment in living. So from now on I want to dedicate myself entirely to these latter (worries) — but I am already aware of the traps in this question and that's why for some time now my first need has been to "de-journalistize" myself, to get myself out of the stranglehold that has dominated these last few years of my life, reading books to review immediately, commenting on something even before having to time to form an opinion on it. I want to build a new kind of daily program for myself where I can finally get into something, something definitive (within the limits of historical possibility), something not dishonest or insincere (unlike the way today’s journalist always behaves, more or less). For that reason I make several plans for myself: … to maintain my contacts with reality and the world, but being careful, of course, not to get lost in unnecessary activities; and also to set up my own individual work not as a "journalist" any more but as a "scholar," with systematic readings, notes, comments, notebooks, a load of things I've never done; and also, eventually, to write a novel.

— Calvino

"At midnight, alone on the shore. One moment more and then I shall set sail. The sky itself has weighed anchor, with all its stars, like those ships which at this very hour gleam throughout the world with all their lights and illuminate dark harbour waters. Space and silence weigh equally upon the heart. A sudden love, a great work, a decisive act, a thought which transfigures, all these at certain moments bring the same unbearable anxiety, linked with an irresistible charm. Is living like this in the delicious anguish of being, in exquisite proximity to a danger whose name we do not know the same as rushing to our doom? Once again, without respite, let us go.

I have always felt that I was living on the high seas, threatened, at the heart of a royal happiness."

— Camus, standing before the sea of Algiers.

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." — Brian W. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger

“It is an act of cowardice to seek from (or to wish to give) the people we love any other consolation than that which works of art give us. These help us through the mere fact that they exist. To love and to be loved only serves mutually to render this existence more concrete, more constantly present to the mind." — Gravity and Grace

I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer grey skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are grey.