petradactyl

lostcosmonaut:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they’re so placid and self contain’d,
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the earth.

— Walt Whitman, excerpt from “Song of Myself”

2010.05.21 AP Photo/Domingo Botan

“Somehow we’ve completely internalized and accepted collectively this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked…”

rrraww:

“We writers, we kind of do have that reputation, and not just writers, but creative people across all genres, it seems, have this reputation for being enormously mentally unstable. And all you have to do is look at the very grim death count in the 20th century alone, of really magnificent creative minds who died young and often at their own hands, you know? And even the ones who didn’t literally commit suicide seem to be really undone by their gifts, you know. Norman Mailer, just before he died, last interview, he said “Every one of my books has killed me a little more.” An extraordinary statement to make about your life’s work, you know. But we don’t even blink when we hear somebody say this because we’ve heard that kind of stuff for so long and somehow we’ve completely internalized and accepted collectively this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked and that artistry, in the end, will always ultimately lead to anguish.

And the question that I want to ask everybody here today is are you guys all cool with that idea? Are you comfortable with that — because you look at it even from an inch away and, you know — I’m not at all comfortable with that assumption. I think it’s odious. And I also think it’s dangerous, and I don’t want to see it perpetuated into the next century. I think it’s better if we encourage our great creative minds to live.”

- Elizabeth Gilbert, from her TED talk.

Kanye West facts

In Kanye West’s hit song “Power,” he says the line “I guess every superhero needs his theme music.” This line was inspired by Kanye West’s own theme song, “Power” by Kanye West, which he was listening to while writing “Power.”

(Source: mowg1i, via what-is-this-i-dont-even)