Stanley Elkin Quotes

When you play piano, your left hand and right hand are synced. Your brain basically has a clock, so that the right hand knows that 0.3 seconds after I hit this key, I need to hit that one. And the right hand knows not to hit keys that the left hand is playing, so the hands do not collide.

On the one hand, there are individual actions such as throwing, pushing, touching, rubbing. It is these individual actions that give rise most of the time to abstraction from objects.

I believe managing is like holding a dove in your hand. If you hold it too tightly you kill it, but if you hold it too loosely, you lose it.

Anticipation of movement, through muscular innervation and memory, by its retention of nerve impulse images, extend the present to the limit of a second or so.

Shooting action is very, very meticulous, it's increments, tiny little pieces.

It seems like everything that we see perceived in the brain before we actually use our own eyes, that everything we see is coming through computers or machines and then is being input in our brain cells. So that really worries me.

I never do any brainwork that anyone else can do for me

They that do the world's work must do its thinking.

Done right, precision can help clarify, plus it's fun.

Women are in this respect more fortunate than men, that most of their employments are of such a nature that they can at the same time be thinking of quite different things.

Interestingly, schizophrenics can tickle themselves because of a problem with their timing that does not allow their motor actions and resulting sensations to be correctly sequenced.

In fine, the truffle is the very diamond of gastronomy.

She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.

Attention is the ability we have to discriminate and to focus only on that which we want to perceive.

A good banker isn't careless with pennies; a good leader isn't sloppy about details.

Thinking is harder work than hard work.

In the course of normal speaking the inhibitory function of the will is continuously directed to bringing the course of ideas and the articulatory movements into harmony with each other. If the expressive movement which which follows the idea is retarded through mechanical causes, as is the case in writing ... such anticipations make their appearance with particular ease.

Just as the largest library, badly arranged, is not so useful as a very moderate one that is well arranged, so the greatest amount of knowledge, if not elaborated by our own thoughts, is worth much less than a far smaller volume that has been abundantly and repeatedly thought over.

Information work is thinking work.

The tongue should not be suffered to outrun the mind.

We only have our nervous system to paint.

Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.

Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition. These findings add to the growing evidence that good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.

The brain is a robot-computer perfectly designed to fabricate any reality we program it to construct.

Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead.