Quotes about problems

The remedy is worse than the disease.

DONALD BARTHELME: ...I was trying to make fiction that was like certain kinds of modern painting. You know, tending toward the abstract. But it’s really very dicey in fiction, because if you get too abstract it just looks like fog, for example.

JO BRANS: Words, after all, have referents. They mean something—colors don’t.

BARTHELME: Not in the same way. So, the project is next to impossible, which is what makes it interesting. There’s nothing so beautiful as having a very difficult problem. It gives purpose to life. And to work. I’m still worrying with it.

Somehow we should learn to know that our problems are our most precious possessions. They are the raw materials of our salvation: no problem — no redemption.

It is through the pain of confronting and resolving problems that we learn.

Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them? Do we want to teach our children to solve them?

Looked at in a wide enough frame, maybe her problems weren’t so large. They just seemed that way when she held them up against her eyes where they’d block out all the light.

Trouble is just like love, after all; it comes in unannounced and takes over before you've had a chance to reconsider, or even to think. (p59)

...when we have more minds concerned, any challenge shrinks proportionally. The solution to our greatest problems may simply be involvement.

Treat the Disease, Not the Symptom.

Don't solve problems, pursue opportunities.

When you don't share your problems, you resent hearing the problems of other people.

“Where there is mind, there is always solution,” Keneenk taught. All problems contained the elements of their answer.