“Love, as I see it today, is very conditional. It’s this idea that as long as our partners fit within a specific set of conditions, constructs and expectations, we will continue to love them. That’s a bit fucked up in my opinion. I think we need to give our partners room to explore, to make mistakes, to grow and to experience this life to the fullest. I think we need to remember that we are loves, not keepers.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 124)
“When you live with the understanding that each moment might be your last, everything changes. You begin loving the people in your life harder. You begin sacrificing your body and soul to make good work. You begin living with an insatiable appetite to devour the moment you’re living in now. It will feel foreign but it will ignite your being. Death will no longer scare you as you come to the profound realization that the only death you truly face is not living fully now. So, please. I beg you. Devour this moment whole, my friend.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 122)
“I was jealous of other men where it concerned the women I was dating because I was scared of losing her to him. I was at war. Love should be many things but it should never be war. Jealousy was my body and mind’s way of doing everything I could to not be abandoned, to not feel that pain of someone leaving. As a result, I led an exhausting life. I couldn’t enjoy love or intimacy because I was so fucking terrified of losing it. Numerous people, both men and women alike, struggle with jealousy. We attempt to mask it in our relationships as being healthy or flattering, branding it as some sort of fucked up proof our partners care about us. But jealousy is not love. It’s selfishness. If we’re not careful, it’s an emotion that can quickly transform into possession. Let her keep her wings.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 112)
“Most of the hateful humans we run into on a daily basis are just growing up children, hurting. That’s heartbreaking. But it’s freeing. It gives us permission to be better to ourselves and our fellow humans.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 110)
“Falling for people through screens is dangerous. It’s fiction. It’s stranger than fiction. We’re not falling for people, but rather the idea of them we’ve fabricated in our own heads. It’s like falling in love with Lady Brett Ashley in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. After I read Hemingway, I fell in love with that women. But, I can’t take her to dinner because she doesn’t exist. And, that is our generation’s curse, falling for the pretty fiction behind glowing screens that we create in our own heads. At times, I wonder if our imaginations will be the death of any chance we have at love.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 108)
“We often confuse love with possession.
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 106)
Unlike our pets, humans weren’t meant to be kept on leashes.
They weren’t meant to be neutered and spayed.
Their wings weren’t meant to be clipped for the sake of your possession.
When you love someone, you love them unconditionally.
You love them not under the condition they’ll be here forever.
But, rather, that they chose to be here, for a moment or a lifetime.
Even though they could have flown anywhere.”
“Most vulnerability we see today
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 93)
isn’t true vulnerability.
It’s convenient vulnerability.
It’s being vulnerable to better one’s
position in the public eye.
It’s conditional vulnerability.
It’s this idea that one will only be
vulnerable in situations where it’s
advantageous to one’s self.
Being vulnerable should be a selfless act.
It’s making the difficult choice of sharing
raw painful truths in hopes to build
something beautiful from that suffering.”
“There’s little room for rationality in love. There’s room for compassion, honesty and forgiveness. But, if you’re approaching love with a sense of rationality, like it’s some black and white problem to be solved, you’re not truly loving. You might think you’re loving. But you’re not truly loving.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 86)
“The creative does not live off wins. The creative lives off the work. That’s what keeps her nourished.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 66)
“The moment we find ourselves feeling bored, sad, anxious or complacent we reach for our phones, a prescription or a self-help book. We’ve become terrified of feeling anything negative. I’m not going to point a finger, but if someone held a gun to my head and told me to point a finger, I’d point to Instagram and Twitter and Facebook. I’d say we were due. I’d say that when you have an entire society overly focused on sharing the upper 1% of their days in a virtual world 24/7, we were bound to create some deep-rooted fears and insecurities around negative emotions. Now, we are forced to reap what we have sown.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 64)
“Like the volcano or the Phoenix, the creative process is an inferno that makes room for something new, something brilliant, something lovely. It’s messy. It’s bloody. It’s demanding. It’s rigorous. But, it’s also human. We destroy things not out of hatred but out of love—to make room to till the soil and plant the seeds of our vision. So, when you find yourself feeling self-destructive, don’t panic. Instead, reflect. What vision are you subconsciously making room for?“
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 62)
“A few short rules worth living by: 1) Make good art. 2) Live fast. 3) Pet dogs. 4) Give without expectation. 5) Say nice things to others, daily. 6) Leave people better than you found them. 7) Buy experiences more often than products. 8) Always make time for coffee with people you care about.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 50)
“Be thankful for the hurt.
Find meaning in the hurt.
And,
understand every moment that it hurts
represents another moment
you’re alive
and breathing
and living
and loving
and experiencing
all the beauty
this world has to offer.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 48)
“While competition certainly makes sense in the world of sports—where at the end of each game somebody wins and somebody loses—there’s no place for competition in the arts. One way to determine whether or not art is ‘successful’ is if it’s original. Ironically, it’s impossible to be original in the arts if you’re competing with another artist, because to compete is to agree you are playing the same game. And so in art, to compete is to lose.”
Cole Schafer
“Sometimes, I wonder if we hurt others because we feel lonely in our own pain.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 45)
“I couldn’t tell you what I fear
more. Spending the rest of my life
with just one person. Or, never
finding one person I want to spend
the rest of my life with.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 43)
“How to talk to people.
1. Listen.
2. Look them in the eyes (I struggle here).
3. Set your phone on silent & leave it face down on the table.
4. Don’t make small talk (everyone knows it’s cold).
5. Listen.
6. Don’t agree just for the sake of agreeing.
7. Don’t disagree just for the sake of disagreeing.
8. Listen.
9. Say something interesting.
10. Leave them better than you found them.
11. Listen.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 39)
“When you hate someone,
be certain you’re hating them,
not the fabricated version of them
you’ve created in your head.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 29)
“When we remember that the people we stumble
into on a day-to-day basis are all
just works-in-progress, it gives us permission to have
greater patience, compassion and love towards
them. Not unlike ourselves, they’re trying to pilot
the plane while they build it. They’re learning as they
go. Failing more often than succeeding.
And, at times, finding themselves desperately
close to giving up. If we have one single
responsibility as humans, it’s to love (or at the
very least respect) one another through this
work-in-progress. It’s being empathetic
to the fact that nobody is exactly who they want to be,
nor where they want to be, but they’re working
like hell to get there.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 21)
“Most of what we see today in this virtual world we play in is not self-love but self-obsession. Men and women throw a mask on it and call it self-love, but it’s not. When you love yourself, that light shines through, it beams out of you penetrating into the hearts and minds of others, inspiring them to love themselves too. When you’re obsessed with yourself, you produce no light, only darkness. Self-obsessed people want the world darker so they can burn brighter. To put it in less abstract terms, when someone stumbles into you (be it in the physical or virtual world) will they leave feeling fuller, stronger, lovelier? Or, will they leave feeling less? That is the fundamental difference between self-love and self-obsession. Those who love themselves show others how to love themselves too.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 5)