Olu Online

quotes

last updated 2 weeks, 1 day ago

quotes that i like and am comfortable having associated with me lol, i need to look into the source material of a lot of the things i have clipped so starting out with ones i can easily trace, as of august 2025...

"the hilarious thing about an all or nothing mentality... i'm one of those people who is like it's all or nothing, it's all or nothing, that's how i am! well i know what all or nothing looks like, and it's nothing" - caroline winkler, in a video about "glowing up" so maybe just watch 'til 3:17 if you are not interested in that.

misquoted by me in weeknotes #49 and some other weeknotes i will add when i can be bothered.

"i make writing as much a part of my life as i do eating or listening to music." — from claudia tate's interview in maya angelou: an interview.

this is more a mantra for me, as i think a lot better on paper or out loud than i do with all my thoughts in my head, so why am i always trying to force myself to think in that way? 'feeling a bit off? oh, i guess i haven't written today' is the goal lol.

"a large percentage of people’s problems in work, love and life are due to some combination of vagueness and passivity. you don’t know what you want to spend your time on; you don’t know what kind of person you really get along with; you don’t know what kind of clothing looks good to you; you don’t know what you value in a city; you don’t know how to spend a Saturday night. and even if you do know, you might not know how to find it. if you can articulate more to yourself, you can get more specific, and start looking for it." — ava of bookbear express, excuse the substack.

i don't really agree writing would help every person (as is said in the post), or even most people, get that specificity, but i do think that this is a problem with stuff in people's locus of control (the largest part as we all know is structural and systemic).

and in july, i was talking with that same mentor about all of this and i said something like "i've survived so long i hardly recognize myself" and in my head, it was something i was saying with a sense of despair, even a kind of playful despair. but then when i heard it out loud i was like...oh wait, actually that's fucking sick! we did it! - hanif abdurraqib, instagram stories (the ultimate "trust me bro" of sources)

he was talking about chatgpt in relation to its sycophancy and encouraging role in some suicides, which is heavy i know, but the quote in the quote is something i have never really said out loud to myself in relation to surviving, and i needed to hear it.

"It's a nice big fat eastern western philosophical question, about: how do you get through? Sometimes you don't survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It's not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can, under completely impossible circumstances. It's that, that makes it elegant. Good is just more interesting, more complex, more demanding. Evil is silly, it may be horrible, but at the same time it's not a compelling idea. It's predictable. It needs a tuxedo, it needs a headline, it needs blood, it needs fingernails. It needs all that costume in order to get anybody's attention. But the opposite, which is survival, blossoming, endurance, those things are just more compelling intellectually if not spiritually, and they certainly are spiritually. This is a more fascinating job. We are already born, we are going to die. So you have to do something interesting that you respect in between." Toni Morrison in an interview

"The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain." - Ursula K. Le Guin

these two i'm trying to drill into my psyche, very bojack horseman diane endgame-coded; pain is not the point or the way.

"Dreams are great, but they can't hold a candle to life itself. Life's pretty rad." — Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya, Where I've Been, and the Future of This Blog

if you liked this post, please:

#alphabet-superset