Having and stimulating your Growth mindset is key for leaders, and so investing time to read widely as well as deeply is one way to give focus to this. With that in mind, each Tuesday I post “Writing I Love”. Sometimes a business book, sometimes a leadership quote, often something more esoteric, such as a poem, novel, song lyric.
This quote from Murakami speaks to these weekly posts, and today, inspired by a Tweet from Matt Haig a few weeks ago, simply sharing a number of opening lines of books, closing lines of movies, quotes, sayings, song lyrics.
Am also musing on classicism and romanticism and where I sit on that spectrum. From the lines below, one can see that I am certainly somewhat of a romantic, yet I can also be highly practical and rational. All things in balance!
Innovation is as simple as “doing things differently and doing different things”, so I’d love it if one or two of these inspire you to google the author, the line, pick up a book, watch a movie, listen to a song.
Enjoy this selection.
What is your favourite sentence ever written?
— Matt Haig (@matthaig1) April 7, 2018
“There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in” – Leonard Cohen
“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.” – Douglas Adams
“Not all those who wander are lost” – JRR Tolkien
“I came here today because I realized.. that when you want to spend the rest of your life with someone.. you’ll want the rest of your life start as soon as possible.” – When Harry Met Sally
“This too shall pass” – Sufi adage
“with him, life was routine, without him, life was unbearable” – Harper Lee
“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“and in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make” – The Beatles
“eventually all things merge into one, and a river runs through it” – A River Runs Through It.
“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Gabriel Garcia Márquez
“He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and thanks to this artifice, we manage to endure the burden of the past.” – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“There is no God and we are his prophets.” — Cormac McCarthy
“These moments that I’ve had, these moments of pleasure” – Kate Bush
“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened”
“And in that moment, everything I knew to be true about myself up until then was gone.” – Robert James Waller
“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.” – Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland