When you're writing, you're conjuring. It's a ritual, and you need to be brave and respectful and sometimes get out of the way of whatever it is that you're inviting into the room.
Tom WaitsRead
It's very hard to stop doing things you're used to doing. You almost have to dismantle yourself and scatter it all around and then put a blindfold on and put it back together so that you avoid old habits.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Breaking old habits requires significant effort and a complete reevaluation of oneself.
In this quote, Tom Waits illustrates the struggle of overcoming ingrained behaviors and habits that are deeply embedded in our lives. He suggests that to truly change, one must undergo a process of dismantling their existing self, symbolically scattering their habits, and then reassembling their identity without the influence of those old patterns. This metaphorical blindness emphasizes the difficulty of change and the need for conscious effort to cultivate new habits.
Themes
ChangeHabitsEffortTransformationSelf-Improvement
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a motivational speech about personal growth and transformation.
More from Tom Waits
All quotes →If you're in the middle of the ocean with no flippers and no life preserver and you hear a helicopter, this is music. You have to adjust to your needs at the moment.
Tom WaitsRead
I knelt at the altar of Ray Charles for years. I worked at a restaurant, and that's all there was on the jukebox.
Tom WaitsRead
Don't plant your bad days. They grow into weeks. The weeks grow into months. Before you know it, you got yourself a bad year. Take it from me - choke those little bad days. Choke 'em down to nothing.
Tom WaitsRead
My reality needs imagination like a bulb needs a socket. My imagination needs reality like a blind man needs a cane.
Tom WaitsRead
Now its raining its pouring the old man is snoring now I lay me down to sleep I hear the sirens in the street all my dreams are made of chrome I have no way to get back home I’d rather die before I wake like Marilyn Monroe and throw my dreams out in the street and the rain make ‘em grow
Tom WaitsRead
Similar quotes
The map of the world is always changing; sometimes it happens overnight. All it takes is the blink of an eye, the squeeze of a trigger, a sudden gust of wind. Wake up and your life is perched on a precipice; fall asleep, it swallows you whole.
Anderson CooperRead
The customs and fashions of men change like leaves on the bough, some of which go and others come.
Dante AlighieriRead
I personally think that gentrification happens long before you start seeing white people in formerly people-of-color neighborhoods. It starts happening when we start telling the young, hard-working, quote-unquote 'smart' kids that they need to measure success by how far they get away from our communities.
Majora CarterRead
There are more black men incarcerated today than there were slaves in 1850.
John LegendRead
I have seen periods of progress followed by reaction. I have seen the hopes and aspirations of Negroes rise during World War II, only to be smashed during the Eisenhower years. I am seeing the victories of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations destroyed by Richard Nixon.
Bayard RustinRead
The people generally get accustomed to the established order of things and begin to tremble at the very idea of a change. It is this lethargical spirit that needs be replaced by the revolutionary spirit.
Bhagat SinghRead