It’s Salmagundi Sunday, where I share the “best of the rest”—great links that didn’t make the cut for last week’s newsletters…and a few pithy quotes. Back to regular programming tomorrow!

LINKS

• Fallen Books brings together images of toppled books housed in seismically active libraries…

• Yung Chen Lin’s disturbing photography.

• Extinct smells…an “Ask MetaFilter” thread.

• Endings are hard. Who Knows How This Column Will End?

• Hand lettering resources, including tutorials and two free intro classes, by Sean McCabe.

• William Farges’s Ligne Blanche, a chimerical photo series.

• If you’re a Facebook user, the Cool Freaks Wikipedia Club shares some of the stranger pages from Wikipedia.

• A tidy entry showing the process of creating a letterpress card.

• Amorak Huey on Writing Funny.

• The Mysterious Case of the Park Poet.

• Peaches Sold as Sexy Butts in China.

Commonplaces: risk

“The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.” (Tacitus)

“Stand at the top of a cliff and jump off and build your wings on the way down.” (Ray Bradbury)

“She’d risked everything, and here was the result: the raw, warped core of her life.” (Jennifer Egan)

“She did not explain it; she could not. It was not a matter of living alone, though in her case this had been necessary. The freedom she meant was self-conquest. It was not a natural state. It was meant only for those who would risk everything for it, who were aware that without it life is only appetites until the teeth are gone.” (James Salter)

“There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value.” (Jeanette Winterson)

“They say ol’ man Beach is crazy. And maybe he is. But he goes ahead anyways. He’s the sort of man who knows the only things worth doing are the things might break your heart.” (Colum McCann)

“Why not go out on a limb? That’s where the fruit is.” (Will Rogers)

“In some ways, risk-taking is the ultimate act of self-indulgence, an obscene insult to the preciousness of life. And yet, how can one dismiss something that persists despite every reasonable theory that it shouldn’t?” (Sebastian Junger)

“If a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.” (Henry Thoreau)

“People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.” (Peter Drucker)

“Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence.” (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)

“If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure.” (Dan Quayle)

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