Sifting Quotes

The wise ones fashioned speech with their thought, sifting it as grain is sifted through a sieve.

People review my comic books. People review every article I write - 'The Atlantic' even publishes them. A great deal of the critique of 'Between the World and Me' was from a feminist perspective. bell hooks pushed back, among others. Some of that has value. Some of it does not. I try my best to separate the wheat from the chaff.

The myriad past, it enters us and disappears. Except that within it, somewhere, like diamonds, exist the fragments that refuse to be consumed. Sifting through, if one dares, and collecting them, one discovers the true design.

The Devil is like a strainer that separates the mud from the gold.

If you are looking for a needle in a haystack, why make the haystack bigger.

Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labor of an author composing his work is critical labor; the labor of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing. This frightful toil is as much critical as creative.

Rock bottom is a crisis... and everyone wants to avoid crisis. But what 'crisis' means literally is 'to sift' - like a child who goes to the beach, lifts up the sand, and watches all the sand fall away, hoping that there's treasure left over. That's what crisis does.

I don't like to have to pan for gold when I read.

An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.

We usually overrecord. Then we boil it down to the cream of the cream.

I wrote almost all of it in the deepest hope and conviction. Sifting my thoughts and choosing my words. Trying to say what was true. And I'll tell you frankly, that was wonderful.

Your turn has come to sift through the dreck of humanity for rare specks of originality