“I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief
\nduty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.”
\n –Helen Keller
\n ——————————————
\n“It is amazing how much people can get done if they do not worry
\nabout who gets the credit.”
\n –Sandra Swinney
\n ——————————————
\n“I don’t know anything about luck. I’ve never banked on it, and
\nI’m afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else: hard
\nwork and realizing what it opportunity and what isn’t.”
\n –Lucille Ball
\n ——————————————
\n“My parents always told me that people will never know how long
\nit takes you to do something. They will only know how well it is
\ndone.”
\n –Nancy Hanks
\n ——————————————
\n“While I was in Ann Arbor I heard that Boston was a good place to
\nplay acoustic music because they still had plenty of clubs. So I
\nmoved to Cambridge. I roomed with a Harvard student. I got an
\napartment the first day I got to town by going to Harvard
\nhousing, so I could get cheaper rates, $80 a month or something.
\nI even went to some Harvard classes, just to sit in, because I
\nenjoyed the performance of the professors. The teachers were
\nalways so theatrical at Harvard, intelligent show business
\npeople, that could keep your attention, and that I think, is the
\ngreat advantage of Harvard. So I used to go for the show, no
\nmatter what subject it was. You could just drop in to a class
\nand watch, it wouldn’t matter if you went to the school. No one
\neven asked. The show was good and you would learn something, but
\nyou wouldn’t get any credit for it. I didn’t need the credit.”
\n(Negative Theatre 87)
\n –Ric Ocasek
\n ——————————————
\n“He who angers you enslaves you.”
\n ——————————————
\n“In three words, I can sum up everything I know about life: it
\ngoes on.”
\n –Robert Frost
\n ——————————————
\n“Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.”
\n –Ana\u8650 Nin
\n ——————————————
\n“Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did,
\nbut she did it backwards and in high heels.”
\n –Faith Whittlesey
\n ——————————————
\n“Your real duty is to save your dream.”
\n –Mogdiliani
\n ——————————————
\n“If there is no wind, row.”
\n ——————————————
\n“One good deed dying tongueless slaughters a thousand waiting
\nupon that.”
\n –William Shakespeare
\n ——————————————
\n“There is danger in reckless change; but greater danger in blind
\nconservatism.”
\n –Henry George
\n ——————————————
\n“Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or
\nhow. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The
\nartist never entirely known. We guess. We may be wrong, but we
\ntake leap after leap in the dark.”
\n –Agnes de Mille
\n ——————————————
\n“The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we
\nstand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of
\ninexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim
\na little more land.”
\n –T. H. Huxley
\n ——————————————
\n“The fact that someone says something doesn’t mean it’s true.
\nDoesn’t mean they’re lying, but it doesn’t mean it’s true.”
\n –Carl Sagan
\n ——————————————
\n“I shall live badly if I do not write, and I shall write badly if
\nI do not live.”
\n –Francoise Sagan
\n ——————————————
\n“I tell you: one must have chaos in one to give birth to a
\ndancing star. I tell you: you still have chaos in you.”
\n –Friedrich Nietzsche
\n ——————————————
\n“Often the real test of courage is not to die, but to live.”
\n –Vittorio Alfieri
\n ——————————————
\n“The right to express our thoughts means something only if we are
\nable to have thoughts of our own.”
\n –Erich Fromm
\n ——————————————
\n“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
\n –Socrates
\n ——————————————
\n“He loved to ask his mother questions. It was the pleasantest
\nthing for him to ask a question and then to hear what answer his
\nmother would give. Bambi was never surprised that question after
\nquestion should come into his mind continually and without
\neffort. He found it perfectly natural, and it delighted him very
\nmuch. It was very delightful too, to wait expectantly till the
\nanswer came. If it turned out the way he wanted, he was
\nsatisfied. Sometimes, of course, he did not understand, but that
\nwas pleasant also because he was kept busy picturing what he had
\nnot understood, in his own way. Sometimes he felt very sure that
\nhis mother was not giving him a complete answer, was
\nintentionally not telling him all she knew. And, at first, that
\nwas very pleasant, too. For then there would remain in him such
\na lively curiosity, such suspicion, mysteriously and joyously
\nflashing through him, such anticipation, that he would become
\nanxious and happy at the same time, and grow silent.” (Bambi 20-
\n21)
\n –Felix Salten
\n ——————————————
\n“There are no words that can be spoken to shatter the darkness.
\nWhat is left is silence, and the dawn must creep at its own pace
\nas we wait. There are no words for how we feel. The silence of
\nthe night is the only thing that captures it, and dawn the only
\nthing to set it free. So we wait…”
\n –Karla Jameson
\n ——————————————
\n“When he drank his coffee, that was all he did. If his com
\nchimed or there was a caller at the door, he ignored it. He
\ndidn’t read the newsfax, nor even listen to any of his favourite
\nmusic. His one cup deserved, and got, his full attention. He’d
\nonce heard a story about a monastery on the top of some mountain
\nin Japan or somewhere. After a long trek in the cold to get
\nthere, the monks would offer to sell you a cup of coffee. You
\nhad a choice: There was a two-dollar cup — or a two-hundred-
\ndollar cup. When pressed to explain the difference, the monks
\nwere reported to say, ‘A hundred and ninety-eight dollars.'” (The
\nDigital Effect 21-22)
\n –Steve Perry
\n ——————————————
\n“A great attitude does much more than turn on the lights in our
\nworlds; it seems to magically connect us to all sorts of
\nserendipitous opportunities that were somehow absent before the
\nchange.”
\n –Earl Nightengale
\n ——————————————
\n“People are where they are because that’s exactly where they
\nreally want to be…whether they’ll admit that or not.”
\n –Earl Nightengale
\n ——————————————
\n“We can let circumstances rule us, or we can take charge and rule
\nour lives from within.”
\n –Earl Nightengale
\n ——————————————
\n“Your world is a living expression of how you are using and have
\nused your mind.”
\n –Earl Nightengale
\n ——————————————
\n“Am I motivated by what I really want out of life – or am I mass-
\nmotivated?”
\n –Earl Nightengale
\n ——————————————
\n“All you need is the plan, the road map, and the courage to press
\non to your destination.”
\n –Earl Nightengale
\n ——————————————
\n“Success is the progressive realization of a worthy goal or
\nideal.”
\n –Earl Nightengale
\n ——————————————
\n“Whatever we plant in our subconscious mind and nourish with
\nrepetition and emotion will one day become a reality.”
\n –Earl Nightengale
\n ——————————————
\n“Other times I think about them, though — all this October I
\nhave done so, it seems, because October is the time when men
\nthink mostly about far places and the roads which might get them
\nthere. I sit on the bench in front of Bell’s Market and think
\nabout Homer Buckland and about the beautiful girl who leaned over
\nto open his door when he come down that path with the full red
\ngasoline can in his right hand — she looked like a girl of no
\nmore than sixteen, a girl on her learner’s permit, and her beauty
\nwas terrible, but I believe it would no longer kill the man it
\nturned itself on; for a moment her eyes lit on me, I was not
\nkilled, although part of me died at her feet.” (Mrs. Todd’s)
\n –Stephen King
\n ——————————————
\n“It means that no blue ribbon is forever. Someday — if the
\nworld doesn’t explode itself in the meantime — someone will run
\na two-minute mile in the Olympics. It make take a hundred years
\nor a thousand, but it will happen. Because there is no ultimate
\nblue ribbon. There is zero, and there is eternity, and there is
\nmortality, but there is no ultimate.” (Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut)
\n –Stephen King
\n ——————————————
\n“The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at
\nhand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have
\napplied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.”
\n –Vince Lombardi
\n ——————————————
\n“What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists
\nand it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind
\nin which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined
\nnot to quit until he finds it.”
\n –Alexander Graham Bell
\n ——————————————
\n“Only a man who knows what it is like to be defeated can reach
\ndown to the bottom of his soul and come up with the extra ounce
\nof power it takes to win when the match is even.”
\n –Muhammad Ali
\n ——————————————
\n“This environment [New York] is heaven. I love walking down the
\nstreet and seeing faces and drama and happiness and sadness and
\ndirt and cleanliness. I could never be a country person, sitting
\naround trees trying to write a song. I would rather be in the
\nmiddle of society, whether it’s growing or crumbling.”
\n –Ric Ocasek
\n ——————————————
\n“If a life could have a theme song — and I believe every
\nworthwhile one has — mine is a religion, an obsession, a mania
\nor all of these expressed in one word — individualism. I was
\nborn with that obsession, and I’ve never seen and do not know now
\na cause more worthy, more misunderstood, more seemingly hopeless
\nand tragically needed.”
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘nice doggie’ until you can find
\na rock.”
\n –Will Rogers
\n ——————————————
\n“Congress, our leaders, voted against a proposal to have a
\nnational seven day waiting period to buy a gun. I don’t want to
\nsound like a Quaker, but when you think about it, is a week a
\nlong time to wait? To see if a former mental patient is
\nqualified to own an Uzi? Con one, will ya Congress? It takes
\nthree weeks to get a phone!”
\n –Jimmy Tingle
\n ——————————————
\n“Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking
\nthey hit a triple.”
\n –Barry Switzer
\n ——————————————
\n“I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn’t poor, I
\nwas needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of
\nmyself as needy. I was deprived. (Oh not deprived but rather
\nunderprivileged.) Then they told me that underprivileged was
\noverused. I was disadvantaged. I still don’t have a dime. But
\nI have a great vocabulary.”
\n –Jules Feiffer
\n ——————————————
\n“Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only
\nway you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are
\nconceding that it can’t be taken on its own merits.”
\n –Dan Barker
\n ——————————————
\n“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.”
\n –Derek Bok
\n ——————————————
\n“A man’s ethical behaviour should be based effectually on
\nsympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is
\nnecessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be
\nrestrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.”
\n –Albert Einstein
\n ——————————————
\n“Every time you meet a situation, though you think at the moment
\nit is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the
\ndamned, once you have met it and lived through it you find that
\nforever after you are freer than you were before.”
\n –Eleanor Roosevelt
\n ——————————————
\n“I think life is really hard sometimes. It’s not easy to wake up
\nevery day and go through what you go through. But the beautiful
\nmoments that you share with people that you love, or even
\nexperience alone, are worth all of the pain and sorrow. Those
\nmoments should be cherished, and I think that’s what music is all
\nabout-to remind people of the beautiful moments that are in
\neverybody’s life.”
\n –Charlie Haden
\n ——————————————
\n“Some people would say my paintings show a future world and maybe
\nthey do, but I paint from reality. I put several things and
\nideas together, and perhaps, when I have finished, it could show
\nthe future. If people want to interpret my work as warnings
\nabout too much overpopulation, disease and mechanization in the
\nfuture, then that is up to them. I like to combine human beings,
\ncreatures and biomechanics. And I love to work with bones —
\nthey are elemental and function and, after all, are part of human
\nbeings. I have many bones in my home in Zurich, and I study them
\nand use them as models. Some people say my work is often
\ndepressing and pessimistic, with the emphasis on death, blood,
\novercrowding, strange beings and so on, but I don’t really think
\nit is. There is hope and a kind of beauty in there somewhere, if
\nyou look for it.”
\n –H. R. Giger
\n ——————————————
\n“It was all very well to say, ‘Drink me,’ but the wise little
\nAlice was not going to do that in a hurry. ‘No, I’ll look
\nfirst,’ she said, ‘and see whether it’s marked ‘Poison’ or not.’
\nFor she had read several nice little stories about children who
\nhad got burnt and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant
\nthings, all because they would not remember the simple rules
\ntheir friends had taught them: that a red-hot poker will burn
\nyou if you hold it too long, and that if you cut your finger very
\ndeeply with a knife, it usually bleeds. And she had never
\nforgotten that if you drink too much from a bottle marked
\n‘Poison,’ it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or
\nlater.” (Alice in Wonderland 13-14)
\n –Lewis Carrol
\n ——————————————
\n“One of the expressions of Western over-reliance on technology
\ncan be seen in the lack of patience in industrial society. When
\nyou deal with technology, everything happens at the touch of a
\nbutton. This conditions you to become so impatient that when you
\nhave an emotional or personal crisis, you don’t allow time for
\nthe solution to take effect. This leads to all sorts of rash
\nresponses, like quarrels, fights and so on.”
\n –the Dali Lama (Lhamo Dhondrub)
\n ——————————————
\n“I agree that the fear of American cultural imperialism is shared
\nby many people, and I agree with your point about the invasive
\nnature of television culture. But I wouldn’t draw the next
\ninference: that this is negative and therefore it must be
\nstopped. I feel that one should address this influence in a way
\nthat takes away the negative edge through a positive counter-
\nresponse. This way, you reinforce and reaffirm your conviction
\nin the inner values. You harness those beliefs and develop them
\nwith a greater degree of self-awareness. That’s the kind of
\nresponse people should have, instead of rejecting technology.”
\n –the Dali Lama (Lhamo Dhondrub)
\n ——————————————
\n“In contemporary American public culture, the legacy of the
\nconsumer revolution of the 1960s is unmistakable. Today, there
\nare few things more beloved of our masses than the figure of the
\ncultural rebel, the defiant individualist resisting the mandates
\nof the machine civilization. Whether he is an athlete decked out
\nin a mowhawk and multiple-pierced ears, a policeman who plays by
\nhis own rules, an actor on a motorcycle, a soldier of fortune
\nwith explosive bow and arrow, or a rock star in leather jacket
\nand sunglasses, the rebel has become the paramount clich\ufffd of our
\npopular entertainment, and the pre-eminent symbol of the system
\nhe is supposed to be subverting. In advertising especially, he
\nrules supreme.” (The Conquest of Cool)
\n –Thomas Frank
\n ——————————————
\n“An invasion of armies can be resisted. But not an idea whose
\ntime has come.”
\n –Victor Hugo
\n ——————————————
\n“Sometimes it seems like we’re all living in some kind of prison,
\nand the crime is how much we all hate ourselves. It’s good to
\nget really dressed up once in a while and admit the truth — that
\nwhen you really look closely, people are so strange and so
\ncomplicated that they’re actually beautiful. Possibly even me.”
\n –from My So-Called Life
\n ——————————————
\n“I just want them to feel inspired to live on the planet and not
\nget discouraged with life, and make sure that they pursue what
\nthey feel they ought to. If they want to collect stamps, make
\nsure they collect stamps 100 percent of the time for 25 years. I
\nthink the most important thing is to try to find work or
\nsomething that you love, but it’s also probably the hardest
\nthing. Life in general is more generic and less artistic. It’s
\na hard thing to pull your mind away from the shit and feel
\npositive about where things are going. It depends on how much TV
\nnews you watch.”
\n –Ric Ocasek
\n ——————————————
\n“I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and
\nthat our choices of language and verbal tone have something — a
\ngreat deal — to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up
\nspeaking with and hearing; and that we can deflect words by
\ntrivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we
\ncan let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our
\nminds.” (Toward a More Feminist Criticism)
\n –Adrienne Rich
\n ——————————————
\n“I can’t believe I’m having this conversation… With you!
\nYou’ve probably never read a book in your life that wasn’t
\nwritten by John Grisham. You don’t get it. People like you are
\nso content to write-off English. English just isn’t about
\nanalysing stories — if it was, I wouldn’t be like this.
\nStories, novels, whatever… reflect something about the
\nwriter… and the culture… and the society that it came from.
\nIt’s a mirror — a mirror to ourselves. And when we do it right,
\nwhen we just get it, we know something about ourselves. English
\nis an understanding of the self. If we can see ourselves
\nclearly, we know the right decision to make. And if you don’t
\nknow who you are and make the wrong choices, what good is it if
\nyou can make two-hundred and fifty thousand?” (The Open Door)
\n –Tyler Powell
\n ——————————————
\n“Let me tell you something. We’re all guilty of something.
\nCruelty or greed or going sixty-five in a fifty-five mile per
\nhour zone. But you know what? You want to think of yourself as
\nthe fair haired choir boy, you go ahead. … I’m saying you’ve
\ngot a darkness inside of you. You’ve got to know the darker,
\nuglier sides of yourself. You’ve got to recognize them so
\nthey’re not constantly sneaking up on you. You’ve got to love
\nthem because they’re a part of you, because along with your
\nvirtues, they make you who you are. Virtue isn’t virtue unless
\nit slams up against vice so, consequently, your virtue is not
\nreal virtue until it’s been tested… and tempted.”
\n –from Homicide: Life on the Street
\n ——————————————
\n“A soulmate is someone who has locks that fit our keys, and keys
\nto fit our locks. When we feel safe enough to open the locks,
\nour truest selves step out and we can be completely and honestly
\nwho we are; we can be loved for who we are and not for who we’re
\npretending to be. Each unveils the best part of the other. No
\nmatter what else goes wrong around us, with that one person we’re
\nsafe in our own paradise. Our soulmate is someone who shares our
\ndeepest longings, our sense of direction. When we’re two
\nballoons, and together our direction is up, chances are we’ve
\nfound the right person. Our soulmate is the one who makes life
\ncome to life.” (Bridge 265)
\n –Richard Bach
\n ——————————————
\n“What was the question? … Oh. Where do I get my crazy ideas?
\nAnswer: sleep-fairy, walk-fairy, shower-fairy. Book-fairy. And
\nin these last few years, from my wife. Now when I have questions
\nI ask her and she tells me the answer. If you haven’t already,
\nI’d suggest you want to find your soulmate, soon as you can.
\nNext question?” (Bridge 264)
\n –Richard Bach
\n ——————————————
\n“She didn’t mean to be sexy that moment, but even a winter
\nnightgown couldn’t hide that lovely outline. When will I outgrow
\nmy simple-minded fascination with the form she had happened to
\nchoose for her body? Never, I thought.” (Bridge 249)
\n –Richard Bach
\n ——————————————
\n“What a story that would make! How many men and women go through
\nthe same rivers, menaced by the same sharp clich\uff34, the same
\njagged dangers that have threatened us! If the idea stands up, I
\nthought, it would be worth uncovering the typewriter! How
\nRichard-years-ago would have wanted to know: What happens when
\nwe set off searching for a soulmate who doesn’t exist, and find
\nher?” (Bridge 209)
\n –Richard Bach
\n ——————————————
\n“We’re different, we’re the same. You thought you’d never find a
\nword to say to a woman who didn’t fly airplanes. I couldn’t
\nimagine myself spending time with a man who didn’t love music.
\nCould it be it’s not as important to be alike as it is to be
\ncurious? Because we’re different, we can have the fun of
\nexchanging worlds, giving our loves and excitements to each
\nother. You can learn music, I can learn flying. And that’s only
\nthe beginning. I think it would go on for us as long as we
\nlive.” (Bridge 169)
\n –Richard Bach
\n ——————————————
\n“If we change in different directions, then we don’t have any
\nfuture anyway, do we? I think it’s possible for two people to
\nchange together, to grow together and enrich instead of diminish
\neach other. The sum of one and one, if they’re the right ones,
\ncan be infinity! But so often one person drags the other down;
\none person wants to go up like a balloon and the other’s a dead
\nweight. I’ve always wondered what it would be like if both
\npeople, if a woman and a man both wanted to go up like balloons!”
\n(Bridge 168)
\n –Richard Bach
\n ——————————————
\n“That’s what learning is, after all: not whether we lose the
\ngame, but how we lose and how we’ve changed because of it and
\nwhat we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to
\nother games. Losing, in a curious way, is winning.” (Bridge 91)
\n –Richard Bach
\n ——————————————
\n“Here’s how the people live here, in big house-shaped boxes to
\nkeep off ‘rain’ and ‘snow,’ holes cut in the sides so they can
\nsee out. They move around in smaller boxes, painted different
\ncolours, with wheels on the corners. They need this box-culture
\nbecause each person thinks of herself and himself as locked in a
\nbox called a ‘body,’ arms and legs, fingers to move pencils and
\ntools, languages because they’ve forgotten how to communicate,
\neyes because they’ve forgotten how to see. Odd little planet.
\nWish you were here. Home soon.” (Bridge 85-6)
\n –Richard Bach
\n ——————————————
\n“Two things I do value a lot, intimacy and the capacity for joy,
\ndidn’t seem to be on anyone else’s list. I felt like the
\nstranger in a strange land, and decided I’d better not marry the
\nnatives.” (Bridge 76)
\n –Richard Bach
\n ——————————————
\n“Other people think they know what you are: glamour, sex, money,
\npower, love. It may be a press agent dream which has nothing to
\ndo with you, maybe it’s something you don’t even like, but that’s
\nwhat they think you are. People rush at you from all sides, they
\nthink they’re going to get these things if they touch you. It’s
\nscary, so you build walls around yourself, thick glass walls
\nwhile you’re trying to think, trying to catch your breath. You
\nknow who you are inside, but people outside see something
\ndifferent. You can choose to become the image, and let go of who
\nyou are, or continue as you are and feel phony when you play the
\nimage.” (Bridge 72)
\n –Richard Bach
\n ——————————————
\n“There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no
\nmatter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we
\nneed to learn; whatever steps we take, they’re necessary to reach
\nthe places we’ve chosen to go.” (Bridge 56)
\n –Richard Bach
\n ——————————————
\n“Part of us is always the observer, and no matter what, it
\nobserves. It watches us. It does not care if we are happy or
\nunhappy, if we are sick or well, if we live or die. Its only job
\nis to sit there on our shoulder and pass judgment on whether we
\nare worthwhile human beings.” (The Bridge Across Forever 43)
\n –Richard Bach
\n ——————————————
\n“We fear passion and laugh at too much love and those who love
\ntoo much. And still we long to feel.”
\n –Jeanette Winterson
\n ——————————————
\n“By the time the average person finishes college he or she will
\nhave taken over 2,600 tests, quizzes and exams. The ‘right
\nanswer’ approach becomes deeply ingrained in our thinking. This
\nmay be fine for some mathematical problems, where there is in
\nfact only one right answer. The difficulty is that most of life
\nisn’t that way. Life is ambiguous; there are many right answers –
\nall depending on what you are looking for. But if you think
\nthere is only one right answer, then you’ll stop looking as soon
\nas you find one.”
\n –Roger von Oech
\n ——————————————
\n“You say I have no power? Perhaps you speak truly… but you say
\nthat dreams have no power here? Tell me, Lucifer Morningstar…
\nask yourselves, all of you… what power would hell have if those
\nhere imprisoned were not able to dream of heaven?”
\n –Neil Gaiman
\n ——————————————
\n“A friend is one before whom I may think aloud.”
\n –Ralph Waldo Emmerson
\n ——————————————
\n“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby
\nbecome a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the
\nabyss gazes also into you.”
\n –Friedrich Nietzsche
\n ——————————————
\n“If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to keep getting
\nwhat we’re getting.”
\n –Stephen Covey
\n ——————————————
\n“It’s hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.”
\n –Sally Kempton
\n ——————————————
\n“We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become
\none of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of
\nthought.”
\n –Bertrand Russell
\n ——————————————
\n“Happiness is not in our circumstance but in ourselves. It is
\nnot something we see, like a rainbow, or feel, like the heat of a
\nfire. Happiness is something we are.”
\n –John B. Sheerin
\n ——————————————
\n“The self is not something that one finds, it is something that
\none creates.”
\n –Thomas Szasz
\n ——————————————
\n“It’s better to be boldly decisive and risk being wrong than to
\nagonize at length and be right too late.”
\n –Marilyn Moats Kennedy
\n ——————————————
\n“You’ll never know if you can win until you know you’ve tried
\nyour best… and then it doesn’t matter if you’ve won or not
\nbecause you will have improved, and that is winning for
\nyourself.”
\n –Carolyn Meroniuk
\n ——————————————
\n“There are threads that help you find your way back, and there
\nare threads that intend to bring you back. Mind turns to pull,
\nit’s hard to pull away. I’m always thinking of going back. When
\nLot’s wife looked over her shoulder, she turned into a pillar of
\nsalt. Pillars hold things up, and salt keeps things clean, but
\nit’s a poor exchange for losing your self. People do go back,
\nbut they don’t survive, because two realities are claiming them
\nat the same time. Such things are too much. You can salt your
\nheart, or kill your heart, or you can choose between the two
\nrealities. There is much pain here. Some people think you can
\nhave your cake and eat it. The cake goes mouldy and they choke
\non what’s left. Going back after a long time will make you mad,
\nbecause the people you left behind do not like to think of you
\nchanged, will treat you as they always did, accuse you of being
\nindifferent, when you are only different.”
\n –Jeanette Winterson
\n ——————————————
\n“Of course that is not the whole story, but that is the way with
\nstories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the
\nuniverse while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a way of
\nkeeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who
\ntells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that
\neverybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true
\nthings to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be
\nproved. I don’t believe them. The only thing for certain is how
\ncomplicated it all is, like string full of knots. It’s all there
\nbut hard to find the beginning and impossible to fathom the end.
\nThe best you can do is admire the cat’s cradle, and maybe knot it
\nup a bit more. History should be a hammock for swinging and a
\ngame for playing, the way cats play. Claw it, chew it, rearrange
\nit and at bedtime it’s still a ball of string full of knots.
\nNobody should mind. Some people make a lot of money out of it.
\nPublishers do well, people make a lot of money out of it.
\nPublishers do well, children, when bright, can come top. It’s an
\nall-purpose rainy day pursuit, this reducing of stories called
\nhistory.”
\n –Jeanette Winterson
\n ——————————————
\n“Since I was born I had assumed that the world ran on very simple
\nlines, like a larger version of our church. Now I was finding
\nthat even the church was sometimes confused. This was a problem.
\nBut not one I chose to deal with for many years more. The
\nproblem there and then was what was going to happen to me. The
\nVictoria Hospital was big and frightening, and I couldn’t even
\nsing to any effect because I couldn’t hear what I was singing.
\nThere was nothing to read except some dental notices and an
\ninstruction leaflet for the X-ray machine. I tried to build an
\nigloo out of the orange peel but it kept falling down and even
\nwhen I stood up I didn’t have an Eskimo to put in it, so I had to
\ninvent a story about ‘How Eskimo Got Eaten’, which made me even
\nmore miserable. It’s always the same with diversions; you get
\ninvolved.”
\n –Jeanette Winterson
\n ——————————————
\n“The truth that makes men free is for the most part the truth
\nwhich men prefer not to hear.”
\n –Herbert Sebastian Agar
\n ——————————————
\n“I don’t know because I don’t think about it much in those terms.
\nI don’t think about what is the greatest thing that ever happened
\nto me. It seems to me that things don’t last long anyway. Your
\nhigh points and your low points. High points don’t last that
\nlong, it’s a high and it happens. It’s great at the moment but
\nyou really can’t live on it. There’s gotta be something higher –
\n– and lower. But I have all kinds of ups and downs, highs and
\nlows, I’m always chasing them.”
\n –Ric Ocasek
\n ——————————————
\n“There’s only one opinion that counts. It’s your opinion. It
\nmay be wrong, but it’s yours and that’s the one that counts.”
\n –Filipe Alou
\n ——————————————
\n“The best thing you can do for a song is to hear it on the radio
\nand to imagine what it could mean to you and then kinda forget
\nthe words. Just imagine how you felt when you heard it, if it
\nwas one of your songs. If it became one of your songs. If it
\nmeant whatever it meant for you and as soon as you see the
\nvisual, you get a rapid eye movement relationship with the song
\ninstead of an imaginative one. I think that can be dangerous
\nbecause I don’t think I’d want to be listening to a song on the
\nradio and thinking about the video. Whatever that one
\ninterpretation was.”
\n –Ric Ocasek
\n ——————————————
\n“Good and evil are not what our parents told us, not what our
\nchurch tells us, or our country, not what anybody else tells us!
\nAll of us decide good and evil for ourselves, automatically, by
\nchoosing what we want to do!” (Running)
\n –Richard Bach
\n ——————————————
\n“If we must lose wife or husband when we live to our highest
\nright, we lose an unhappy marriage as well, and we gain
\nourselves. But if a marriage is born between two already self-
\ndiscovered, what a lovely adventure begins, hurricanes and all!”
\n(Running)
\n –Richard Bach
\n ——————————————
\n“Life does not require us to be consistent, cruel, patient,
\nhelpful, angry, rational, thoughtless, loving, rash, open-minded,
\nneurotic, careful, rigid, tolerant, wasteful, rich, downtrodden,
\ngentle, sick, considerate, funny, stupid, healthy, greedy,
\nbeautiful, lazy, responsive, foolish, sharing, pressured,
\nintimate, hedonistic, industrious, manipulative, insightful,
\ncapricious, wise, selfish, kind or sacrificed. Life does,
\nhowever, require us to live with the consequences of our
\nchoices.” (Running)
\n –Richard Bach
\n ——————————————
\n“For a moment, off balance, was I annoyed? Anger is always fear,
\nI thought, and fear is always fear of loss. Would I lose myself
\nif he made those choices? It took a second to settle down: I’d
\nlose nothing. They’d be his wishes, not mine, and he’s free to
\nlive as he wants. The loss would come if I dared force him,
\ntried to live for him and me as well. There’d be disaster worse
\nthan life on a bar stool.” (Running from Safety)
\n –Richard Bach
\n ——————————————
\n“Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have
\nbeen lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that
\nwithout love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the
\nsun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror
\nfor the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in
\nwonderment and felt my cheeks, my neck. This was me. And when I
\nhad looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was not
\nafraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the
\nmirror bearer.” (Passion)
\n –Jeanette Winterson
\n ——————————————
\n“When I dream of a future in her arms no dark days appear, not
\neven a head cold, and though I know it’s nonsense I really
\nbelieve we would always be happy and that our children would
\nchange the world.” (Passion)
\n –Jeanette Winterson
\n ——————————————
\n“I was happy but happy is an adult world. You don’t have to ask
\na child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not.
\nAdults talk about being happy because largely they are not.,
\nTalking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much
\neasier to let it blow all over you. This is where I disagree
\nwith the philosophers. They talk about passionate things but
\nthere is no passion in them. Never talk happiness with a
\nphilosopher.” (The Passion)
\n –Jeanette Winterson
\n ——————————————
\n“They discovered that even in the face of pain that seems
\nunbearable, even in the face of pain that wrings the last drop
\nof blood out of your heart and leaves its scrimshaw tracery on
\nthe inside of your skull, life goes on. And pain grows dull, and
\nbegins to fade.” (Lost Souls)
\n –Poppy Z. Brite
\n ——————————————
\n“I can’t heal your pain but I can see it. And you don’t have to
\nbe lost. Not forever.” (Lost Souls)
\n –Poppy Z. Brite
\n ——————————————
\n“It is the colour of light, the shape of sound, high in the
\nevergreens.
\n It lies suspended in hills, a blue line in a red sky.
\n I am looking at sound.<\/p>\n
I am hearing the brightness of high bluffs and almond trees.
\n I am tasting the wilderness of lakes, rivers and streams,
\n caught in an angle of sound.<\/p>\n
I am remembering water that glows in the dawn,
\n the motion tumbled in earth,
\n life hidden in mounds.<\/p>\n
I am dancing in a bright beam of light…
\n I am remembering love.”
\n –from Love Jones
\n ——————————————
\n“Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever.”
\n(Atlas 735)<\/p>\n
–Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“The opening and middle game are vital but a player up two pieces
\nmight have a heart attack and have to forfeit. The end game is
\nwhat counts.”
\n –Pablo Pedro Gomez
\n ——————————————
\n“The music of [his] Fifth Concerto streamed from his keyboard,
\npast the glass of the window, and spread through the air, over
\nthe lights of the valley. It was a symphony of triumph. The
\nnotes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising
\nitself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they
\nseemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as
\nits motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding
\nand spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the
\ntension of purpose. It swept space clean and left nothing buy
\nthe joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the
\nsounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, bu spoke
\nin laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no
\nugliness or pain, and there never had had to be. It was the song
\nof an immense deliverance.” (Atlas 1072)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“Traditions exist so we can go beyond them.”
\n –Greg Hawkes
\n ——————————————
\n“The most important thing to a lot of people, is to belong to
\nsomething that’s hip or whatever. To be a part of something
\nthat’s not society, just a clique. And they get real sidetracked
\ntrying to think like everyone else. They don’t realize that you
\nhave to motivate yourself to do things you want to do. Some
\npeople just like going along for the ride. And those are the
\nkind of people I don’t get along with too well.”
\n –Ric Ocasek
\n ——————————————
\n“Once they’re on paper, they’re gone. I like to do as much with
\nthe words, as far as image goes, so that it’s really left open
\nfor a lot of things, even though I remember a specific impression
\nof something I had at the time. I can’t say a song is about this
\nor that; in fact, I wouldn’t even want to. I just prefer to have
\npeople live it anyway they want. Because it’s theirs after that.
\nThere’s nothing I can do about it anymore.”
\n –Ric Ocasek
\n ——————————————
\n“To be under pressure is inescapable. Pressure takes place
\nthrough all the world; war, siege, the worries of state. We all
\nknow men who grumble under these pressures and complain. They
\nare cowards. They lack splendour. But there is another sort of
\nman who is under the same pressure but does not complain, for it
\nis the friction which polishes him. It is the pressure which
\nrefines and makes him noble.”
\n –St. Augustine
\n ——————————————
\n“It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out how
\nthe strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have
\ndone better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in
\nthe arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat; who strives
\nvaliantly; who errs and may fail again, because there is no
\neffort without error or shortcoming, but who does actually strive
\nto do the deeds; who does know the great enthusiasm, the great
\ndevotion; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best,
\nknows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at
\nworst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that
\nhis place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know
\nneither victory nor defeat.”
\n –Theodore Roosevelt
\n ——————————————
\n“Through music I either tame my demons or unleash them and allow
\nthem to be what they are. I don’t want the music to be about
\nprovocation, I want the music to bring you to a place where you
\nfeel at home.”
\n –Michael Franti
\n ——————————————
\n“You can’t think of risks. I have nothing to lose. You either
\nmake something that you like, or you don’t, and you throw it to
\nthe universe.”
\n –Mike Myers
\n ——————————————
\n“Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No
\nbarrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious
\ndiscourses of my book friends. They talk to me without
\nembarrassment or awkwardness.”
\n –Helen Keller
\n ——————————————
\n“Not the senses I have but what I do with them is my kingdom.”
\n –Helen Keller
\n ——————————————
\n“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature,
\nnor do the children of men as a while experience it. Avoiding
\ndanger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life
\nis either a daring adventure, or nothing.”
\n –Helen Keller
\n ——————————————
\n“People ignore the strange and unusual… I myself am strange and
\nunusual.”
\n –from Beetlejuice
\n ——————————————
\n“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives means
\nthe most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of
\ngiving much advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to
\nshare our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender
\nhand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of
\ndespair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief
\nand bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not
\nhealing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that
\nis a friend who cares.”
\n –Henri Nouwen
\n ——————————————
\n“Do I avoid looking a stranger in the eyes because I don’t want
\nto make him uncomfortable, or do I turn my eyes so he can’t look
\ninto me? What is in there that I don’t want him to see?” (Notes)
\n –Hugh Prather
\n ——————————————
\n“When someone disagrees with me, I do not have to immediately
\nstart revising what I just said. People don’t want me to always
\nagree with them. They can sense this is phony. They can sense I
\nam trying to control them: I am agreeing with them to make them
\nlike me. They feel; ‘I don’t want to exist to like you. I DON’T
\nexist to like you.'” (Notes)
\n –Hugh Prather
\n ——————————————
\n“Sometimes when I generalize I am saying, ‘Let’s pretend I am
\nGod,’ and of course the other person argues that point endlessly.
\nBut I notice that if the other person takes a stand for himself
\nand states his thoughts as his thoughts, I pay more attention to
\nwhat he is saying and look deeper in myself.” (Notes)
\n –Hugh Prather
\n ——————————————
\n“Within me is the potential to commit every evil act I see being
\ncommitted by other men, and unless I feel this potential I can at
\nany moment be controlled by these same urges. I am free from
\nthese urges only if I recognize when I am feeling them, and while
\nfeeling them and acknowledging them to be me, choose not to
\nfollow them. Only in this way can I begin to regain the disowned
\nparts of me. And only in this way can I know what it is I am
\ncriticizing in others.” (Notes)
\n –Hugh Prather
\n ——————————————
\n“I sometimes react to making a mistake as if I have betrayed
\nmyself. My fear of making a mistake seems to be based on the
\nhidden assumption that I am potentially perfect and that if I can
\njust be very careful I will not fall from heaven. But a
\n‘mistake’ is a declaration of the way I am, a jolt to the way I
\nintend, a reminder I am not dealing with the facts. When I have
\nlistened to my mistakes I have grown.” (Notes)
\n –Hugh Prather
\n ——————————————
\n“Perfectionism is a slow death. If everything were to just like
\nI would want it to, just like I would plan for it to, then I
\nwould never experience anything new; my life would be an endless
\nrepetition of stale successes. When I make a mistake I
\nexperience something unexpected.” (Notes)
\n –Hugh Prather
\n ——————————————
\n“I can not ‘make my mark’ for all time — those concepts are
\nmutually exclusive. ‘Lasting effect’ is a self-contradictory
\nterm. Meaning does not exist in the future and neither do I.
\nNothing will have meaning ‘ultimately.’ Nothing will even mean
\ntomorrow what it did today. Meaning changes with the context.
\nMy meaningfulness is here. It is enough that I am of value to
\nsomeone today. It is enough that I make a difference now.”
\n(Notes to Myself)
\n –Hugh Prather
\n ——————————————
\n“For some reason, when we’re on tour all our dressing rooms have
\nblackboards. So we chalk up New Laws of the Universe like, ‘What
\nis not there, will be,’ and ‘All roads lead to other roads.'”
\n –Greg Hawkes
\n ——————————————
\n“Be more concerned with your character than your reputation,
\nbecause your character is what you really are, while your
\nreputation is merely what others think you are.”
\n –John Wooden
\n ——————————————
\n“Men of genius are admired, men of wealth are envied, men of
\npower are feared; but only men of character are trusted.”
\n ——————————————
\n“Dignity does not consist in possessing honours, but in deserving
\nthem.”
\n –Aristotle
\n ——————————————
\n“You’re all very quiet for people running for their lives.”
\n –from Press Gang
\n ——————————————
\n“I laugh, my voice spiralling into Forever
\n for I have found perfection
\n and it has always been right here
\n in the temple of Self”
\n –Miranda Padgett
\n ——————————————
\n“People tend to think I’m always aggressive and strong. The
\ntruth is, I’ve always been wracked with self-loathing, which
\nleads me into terrible, self paralysing depressions. When I go
\ndown to this place, I feel so empty and overwhelmed I can barely
\nmove. But perversely, I find these traits in a man unacceptable
\n— I can’t stand someone who can out-depress me. You know that
\nscene in Babe where the farmer clog-dances for the pig?
\nSometimes I’m the sick pig and I need a farmer to cheer me up.
\nAnd when things get bad, my boyfriend does dance for me, and it
\nnever fails to make me laugh. He’s a pretty snappy dancer.”
\n –Shirley Manson
\n ——————————————
\n“Remember, beneath every cynic there lies a romantic, and
\nprobably an injured one.”
\n –Glenn Beck
\n ——————————————
\n“Every great and commanding movement in the annals of the world
\nis the triumph of enthusiasm. Nothing great was ever achieved
\nwithout it.”
\n –Ralph Waldo Emerson
\n ——————————————
\n“If there were a mile high mountain of granite, and once every
\nten-thousand years a bird flew past and brushed it with a
\nfeather, by the time that mountain was worn away, a fraction of a
\nsecond would have passed in the context of eternity.”
\n –Lois Duncan
\n ——————————————
\n“People. I knew some of them, but not now. On the moon, I
\nwander among the many pot holes. Their shadows make me feel
\nplanet-stricken. Display model #1: Clusters of magnetic
\nliquids. I would like to uncover the mystery of the scrim. Will
\nI rise to the occasion when it decides to fall by? A tiny
\nwalled-off angel lays an egg. A secret life-the ruminations of a
\ncreature that walks without legs, eats without a mouth, breathes
\nwithout lungs, feels without nerves, then divides and conquers.
\nWhat happens when you try to squeeze a puddle of gravity in your
\nhand? It dissolves into hundreds of silver eggs. Me too. The
\nincubation period was over. Display model #2: People backed up
\ninto a dark corner. Unearthed puzzle, the same the moon all
\nover. Next stage? Parachute, the final explanation arising as I
\nmake my slow descent.”
\n –Gillian McCain
\n ——————————————
\n“Some mornings, it’s just not worth chewing through the leather
\nstraps.”
\n –Emo Phillips
\n ——————————————
\n“The happiest person is the person who thinks the most
\ninteresting thoughts.”
\n –Timothy Dwight
\n ——————————————
\n“Be happy. It is a way of being wise.”
\n –Colette
\n ——————————————
\n“Happiness is not a state to arrive at, but a manner of
\ntravelling.”
\n –M. L. Runbeck
\n ——————————————
\n“It is better to aim at perfection and miss, than to aim at
\nimperfection and hit it.”
\n –T. J. Watson, Sr.
\n ——————————————
\n“Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.”
\n –Lord Alfred Tennyson
\n ——————————————
\n“You are what you do when it counts.”
\n –The Masao
\n ——————————————
\n“I once complained to my father that I didn’t seem to be able to
\ndo things the same way other people did. Dad’s advice? ‘Margo,
\ndon’t be a sheep. People hate sheep. They eat sheep.'”
\n –Margo Kaufmann
\n ——————————————
\n“If you’re never scared or embarrassed or hurt, it means you
\nnever take any chances.”
\n –Julia Soorel
\n ——————————————
\n“Success is a journey, not a destination.”
\n –Ben Sweetland
\n ——————————————
\n“There is zero, and there is eternity, and there is mortality,
\nbut there is no ultimate.”
\n –Stephen King
\n ——————————————
\n“You are what you are — and not what people think you are.”
\n –O. W. Polen
\n ——————————————
\n“Don’t try to be different. Just be good. To be good is
\ndifferent enough.”
\n –Arthur Freed
\n ——————————————
\n“If we’re going to be damned, let’s be damned for who we really
\nare!”
\n –from Star Trek: The Next Generation
\n ——————————————
\n“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little
\ndeath that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I
\nwill permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has
\ngone past over me and through me. And when it has gone past I
\nwill turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone
\nthere will be nothing. Only I will remain.” (Dune)
\n –Frank Herbert
\n ——————————————
\n“About all you can do in life is be who you are. Some people
\nwill love you for you. Most will love you for what you can do
\nfor them, and some won’t like you at all.”
\n –Rita Mae Brown
\n ——————————————
\n“The difficulties of life are intended to make us better, not
\nbitter.”
\n –Mandie Ellingson
\n ——————————————
\n“An ordinary man can… surround himself with two thousand
\nbooks… and thenceforward have at least one place in the world
\nin which it is possible to be happy.”
\n –Augustine Birrell
\n ——————————————
\n“Language exists to conceal true thought.”
\n –Tallyrand
\n ——————————————
\n“A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary.”
\n –Thomas Carruthers
\n ——————————————
\n“People who think honestly and deeply have a hostile attitude
\ntowards the public.”
\n –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
\n ——————————————
\n“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But
\nthe opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound
\ntruth.”
\n –Niels Bohr
\n ——————————————
\n“Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now —
\nalways.”
\n –Albert Schweitzer
\n ——————————————
\n“I can promise to be frank, I cannot promise to be impartial.”
\n –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
\n ——————————————
\n“If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; but
\nif you make them really think, they’ll hate you.”
\n ——————————————
\n“Two things fill my mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe:
\nthe starry skies above me and the moral law within me.”
\n –Immanuel Kant
\n ——————————————
\n“The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win you’re
\nstill a rat.”
\n –Lilly Tomlin
\n ——————————————
\n“God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable
\ngame of his own devising, which might be compared, from the
\nperspective of any other players, to being involved in an obscure
\nand complex version of poker in a pitch dark room, with blank
\ncards, for infinite stakes, with a dealer who won’t tell you the
\nrules and who smiles all the time.”
\n –Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
\n ——————————————
\n“Okay, I’m sorry I don’t write poems about sunsets and nature and
\nmystical experiences, I only know what I know; I could write that
\nthe sight of a sunset lit up my mind like Light Brite and I was
\nenlightened, or that the sun and moon are my mother and father;
\nbut I can’t — I can only write with any semblance of truth about
\nwhat contains my simple frame of reference.”
\n –Gillian McCain
\n ——————————————
\n“All art must come from experience, or it is as fake as the soul
\nof the one who writes it.”
\n –Loriel
\n ——————————————
\n“If you happen to meet a crocodile, don’t stick your head in its
\nmouth. Every now and then, and who knows the reason, people
\nignore this advice, which is sad because they die, but very
\nstupid because they were warned. They had a choice. The moral
\nof the story is this — you can’t afford to be stupid. There are
\ncrocodiles…”
\n –from Press Gang
\n ——————————————
\n“The man who can drive himself further once the effort gets
\npainful is the man who will win.”
\n –Roger Bannister
\n ——————————————
\n“Imagine a life without uncertainty… Imagine how dull life
\nwould be if variables assessed for admission to a professional
\nschool, graduate program, or executive training program really
\ndid predict with great accuracy who would succeed and who would
\nfall. Life would be intolerable — no hope, no challenge.”
\n –R. M. Dawes
\n ——————————————
\n“Go your own way. Question everything. Accept nothing. Accept
\nno dogma, no can’t. There are too many people walking around
\nthinking they’re sacred cows, and they’re only half right.”
\n –Rosie Dimanno
\n ——————————————
\n“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the
\nman who can’t read them.”
\n –Mark Twain
\n ——————————————
\n“Consider a man riding a bicycle. Whoever he is, we can say
\nthree things about him. We know he got on the bicycle and
\nstarted to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get
\noff. Most important of all, we know that if at any point between
\nthe beginning and the end of his journey he stops moving and does
\nnot get off the bicycle he will fall off it. That is a metaphor
\nfor the journey through life of any living thing, and I think of
\nany society of living things.”
\n –William Golding
\n ——————————————
\n“Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the
\nhuman state. If they are to be treated as anything but trivial
\nexercises of the imagination. I suggest there is a simple test
\nwe can apply. … We must forget the whole paraphernalia of
\nsocial description, demonstration, expostulation, approbation,
\ncondemnation. We have to say to ourselves, ‘How would I myself
\nlive in this proposed society? How long would it be before I
\nwent stark staring mad?'”
\n –William Golding
\n ——————————————
\n“We spent all night learning an important less. You can’t judge
\na sewer by its manhole cover. No sir. People can be very
\ndifferent under the surface than they might seem. Quiet, mild-
\nmannered souls might just turn out to be roaring lions of two-
\nfisted cool. And roaring lions of two-fisted cool just might
\nhave some crippling lobster problems! Listen man, it’s all crazy
\ndown there under the surface. A lost wallet could bite you in
\nhalf. A bar of soap could save your life. Egad, a disgusting
\nmound of muck just might have some very compelling ideas. Do you
\ndig my ditch?”
\n –from The Tick
\n ——————————————
\n“I think that you appreciate that there are extraordinary men and
\nwomen, and extraordinary moments when history leaps forward on
\nthe backs of these individuals. That what can be imagined, can
\nbe achieved. That you must dare to dream, but that there is no
\nsubstitute for perseverance and hard work, and team work, because
\nno one gets there alone. And that while we commemorate the
\ngreatness of these events and the individuals who achieve them,
\nwe cannot forget the sacrifice of those who makes these
\nachievements and leaps possible.”
\n –from The X-Files
\n ——————————————
\n“The fact is that liberty, in any true sense, is a concept that
\nlies quite beyond the reach of the inferior man’s mind. And no
\nwonder, for genuine liberty demands of its votaries a quality he
\nlacks completely, and that is courage. The man who loves it must
\nbe willing to fight for it; blood, said Jefferson, is its natural
\nmanure. Liberty means self-reliance, it means resolution, it
\nmeans the capacity for doing without… the average man doesn’t
\nwant to be free. He wants to be safe.”
\n –H. L. Mencken
\n ——————————————
\n“Again, we must ask ourselves why the people that brought war,
\nplane crashes, political corruption, lap dancing and serial
\nkillers to our breakfast tables and into our living rooms are
\ntrying to sooth us with futuristic Web browsers, all buttons and
\nspinning logos.”
\n –Michael Van Biesbrouck
\n ——————————————
\n“I wish that people would take the time to show people that they
\nare important in their lives, either at work, or at home. Too
\nmany times people take others for granted, and I think that needs
\nto change. People are so much nicer and willing to help you if
\nyou use those two little words that mean so much… ‘Thank You!'”
\n –Gina Gillespie
\n ——————————————
\n“I would wish that people come to realize that we create our own
\nrealities, and all our emotions and thoughts are simply choices.
\nIf we were more accountable as human beings we would experience
\nfar, far less suffering and indifference in the world. It is
\nconsiderably easier to place blame outside of ourselves than to
\nlive life from an accountable position.”
\n –Robert Brincka
\n ——————————————
\n“I guess some people never change. Or, they quickly change and
\nthen quickly change back.”
\n –from The Simpsons
\n ——————————————
\n“There’s an element of contempt for meanings. You want to write
\noutside the usual framework. You want to dare readers to make a
\ncommitment you know they can’t make. That’s part of [crazed
\nprose]. There’s also the sense of drowning in information and in
\nthe mass awareness of things. Everybody seems to know
\neverything. Subjects surface and are totally exhausted in a
\nmatter of days. … The writer is driven by his conviction that
\nsome truths aren’t arrived at so easily, that life is still full
\nof mystery, that it might be better for you, dear reader, if you
\nwent back to the living section of your newspaper because this is
\nthe dying section and you don’t really want to be here. This
\nwriter is working against the age and so he feels some
\nsatisfaction at not being widely read. He is diminished by an
\naudience.”
\n –Don DeLillo
\n ——————————————
\n“Because friends have to be brutally honest with each other. I’d
\nfeel terrible if I didn’t tell you what I was thinking,
\nespecially at a time like this.” (Noise)
\n –Don DeLillo
\n ——————————————
\n“We start our lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the
\nworld, we try to devise a shape, a plan. There is dignity in
\nthis. Your whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram. It is a
\nfailed scheme but that’s not the point. To plot is to affirm
\nlife, to seek shape and control. Even after death, most
\nparticularly after death, the search continues. Burial rites are
\nan attempt to complete the scheme, in ritual. Picture a state
\nfuneral. It is all precision, detail, order, design. The nation
\nholds its breath. The efforts of a huge and powerful government
\nare brought to bear on a ceremony that will shed the last trace
\nof chaos. If all geos well, if they bring it off, some natural
\nlaw of perfection is obeyed. The nation is delivered from
\nanxiety, the deceased’s life is redeemed, life itself is
\nstrengthened, reaffirmed.” (Noise)
\n –Don DeLillo
\n ——————————————
\n“Just because it’s on the radio doesn’t mean we have to suspend
\nbelief in the evidence of our senses.” (White Noise)
\n –Don DeLillo
\n ——————————————
\n“Where are the beginnings, the endings, and most important, the
\nmiddles?”
\n –Julio Cort\ufffdzar
\n ——————————————
\n“He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already
\nearned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake,
\nsince for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace
\nto civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at
\ncommand, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance,
\nhow violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is;
\nI would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an
\naction! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war
\nis nothing but an act of murder.”
\n –Albert Einstein
\n ——————————————
\n“That is the future, and it is probably nearer than we think.
\nBut our primary problem as universities is not engineering that
\nfuture. We must rise above the obsession with quantity of
\ninformation and speed of transmission, and recognize that the key
\nissue for us is our ability to organize this information once it
\nhas been amassed — to assimilate it, find meaning in it, and
\nassure its survival for use by generations to come.”
\n –Vartan Gregorian
\n ——————————————
\n“The highest form of guitar soloing is saying something in 16
\nbars and not wasting a note. You can’t aspire to anything finer
\nin a pop record. I’ve never gone for gratuitous soloing. The
\nmost predictable thing in the world is to wank on guitar for days
\non end. It’s like weight lifting. I’m not impressed by it.”
\n –Elliot Easton
\n ——————————————
\n“Little problems are big problems for little minds”
\n –Tom Zimmerman
\n ——————————————
\n“Such is the stuff of waking nightmares, incipient madness, the
\nsort of now-bewildered but soon-to-be-deranged thoughts that
\ncause once well-balanced people to peek under their beds at
\nnight, suspect that their phones are tapped, and, in time, become
\ncertain that sinister forces are monitoring their every move.
\nMaybe it’s the government, maybe it’s the Trilateral Commission,
\nmaybe it’s the saucer people. You can’t trust anyone because
\nanyone and everyone may be one of Them or on of Their Agents.
\nAnd pretty soon you begin writing long letters to the editor of
\nScientific American, or maybe you don’t because the editors are
\nprobably part of the conspiracy too. And you think about lining
\nyour room with aluminum foil to keep the radio waves out, and at
\nnight you roam the streets spray-painting mystic symbols on the
\nwalls to repel strange forces, and all the while you gibber to
\nyourself and what you say makes sense to you if to no one else,
\nand in the end you put your belongings in a shopping bad, better
\nto be mobile, and you look for a dark place you can hide during
\nthe daylight hours, because They are out there, and They are
\nsearching, and They want you in their crosshairs… The
\nheadshrinkers call it paranoia, and when it gets bad they put you
\naway. Because, after all, people who think everyone in the world
\nwants to kill them can be dangerous.”
\n –Joseph R. Garber
\n ——————————————
\n“I cannot feel good about being a woman unless you feel bad about
\nbeing a moan. I cannot be proud of being black unless you are
\nashamed of being white. I cannot respect myself for being gay
\nunless you are embarrassed that you are straight. Tolerance has
\nbeen put by the boards; it is a stale and bitter thing and we
\nwill have none of it. Equality, likewise; is condescending at
\nbest and in truth intended to demean. If I am to achieve the
\ninner harmony and self-respect that is my due, it will not
\nsuffice for you and I to be equals. No! Nothing less than
\nsuperiority will make me happy. And to ensure that I make my
\npoint, I shall commend your libraries to the flames, rewrite your
\nhistories, purge your dictionaries, and arm the thought police
\nwith power to enforce political correctness in all speech and
\napprehension.”
\n –Joseph R. Garber
\n ——————————————
\n“I want you to be able to say anything. Even what you don’t
\nmean.” (Notes to Myself)
\n –Hugh Prather
\n ——————————————
\n“It’s a pity if someone… has to console himself for the wreck
\nof his days with the notion that somehow his voice, his work
\nembodies the deepest, most obscure, freshest, rawest oyster of
\nreality in the unfathomable refrigerator of the heart’s ocean,
\nbut I am such a one, and there you have it. … It is really
\namazing how famous I am to those few who truly comprehend what
\nI’m about. I am the Voice of Suffering and I cannot be
\nconsoled.”
\n –Leonard Cohen
\n ——————————————
\n“Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way.”
\n –General George Patton
\n ——————————————
\n“Be willing to make decisions. That’s the most important quality
\nin a good leader. Don’t fall victim to what I call the Ready-
\nAim-Aim-Aim Syndrome. You must be willing to fire.”
\n –T. Boone Pickens
\n ——————————————
\n“Hello everyone. I suppose you think that nothing much is
\nhappening at the moment. Well, that’s what I want to talk to you
\nall about; endings. Now, endings normally happen at the end.
\nBut as we all know, endings are just beginnings. You know, once
\nthese things really get started, it’s jolly hard to stop them
\nagain. However, as we have all come this far, I think, under the
\ncircumstances the best solution is that we all just keep going.
\nLet’s keep this going in sight, never an ending. Let’s remember
\nthat this world wants fresh beginnings. I feel here, in this
\ncountry, and throughout the world, we are crying out for
\nbeginnings, beginnings. We never want to hear this word
\n‘endings’. I know we all want to sit down. I know you want to
\ntake it easy. Of course we’re looking for the good. Of course
\nwe’re looking for the fresh start.”
\n –Mike Oldfield
\n ——————————————
\n“Whenever someone annoys me, I create a file with his or her name
\non it and drag it to my Mac’s trash icon. If I’m really angry, I
\nempty the trash, and whoever was bugging me disappears into the
\nvoid.”
\n –Margo Kaufman
\n ——————————————
\n“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful
\ntone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean; neither more nor
\nless.'” (Through the Looking-Glass 164)
\n –Lewis Carroll
\n ——————————————
\n“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s
\naffections, and the truth of imagination.”
\n –John Keats
\n ——————————————
\n“To approach telepathy, you start with empathy and crank that up
\nas high as you can. You care about each other. You feel each
\nothers’s joy and pain. You make each other laugh, and help each
\nother cry. You work hard at trusting each other, so that it’s
\nsafe to dismantle the fortress around your ego. You forgive each
\nother anything that stands between you, and try to bring out each
\nother’s best, you work very hard at hosing all the bull-shit out
\nof your head so that it’s clean enough for guests, silencing all
\nthe demons in your subconscious so that it’s quiet enough to hear
\npeople thinking at you, and most of all you find ways to make
\nthat work so much fun that you keep on working. You stick
\ntogether and love each other, and keep growing.”
\n –Spider Robinson
\n ——————————————
\n“You are what you do when it counts”
\n –John Steakley
\n ——————————————
\n“I once listed all the good things I did over the past year, and
\nthen turned them into resolution form and backdated them. That
\nwas a good feeling.”
\n –Robert Fulghum
\n ——————————————
\n“The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their
\ncommitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen
\nfield of endeavour.”
\n –Vince Lombardi
\n ——————————————
\n“Create a vision and never let the environment, other people’s
\nbeliefs, or the limits of what has been done in the past shape
\nyour decisions. Ignore conventional wisdom.”
\n –Anthony Robbins
\n ——————————————
\n“Determine what you want, then resolve to pay the price to get
\nit.”
\n –Bunker Hunt
\n ——————————————
\n“For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin
\n— real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way,
\nsomething to be got through first, some unfinished business, time
\nstill to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin.
\nAt last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.”
\n –Fr. Alfred D’Souza
\n ——————————————
\n“And as cliche as it may sound
\n I’d like to raise another round
\n And if you bottles empty
\n Help yourself to mine
\n Thank you for your time
\n And here’s to life.”
\n –The Refreshments
\n ——————————————
\n“And who ever said there’s nothing new under the sun
\n Never thought much about individuals
\n But he’s dead anyways.”
\n –The Refreshments
\n ——————————————
\n“All great truths begin as blasphemies.”
\n –George Bernard Shaw
\n ——————————————
\n“You see things and say, ‘Why?’, but I dream things and say, ‘Why
\nnot?'”
\n –George Bernard Shaw
\n ——————————————
\n“Truth is not determined by majority vote.”
\n –Doug Gwyn
\n ——————————————
\n“The world is full of magical things patiently waiting for our
\nwits to grow sharper.”
\n –Bertrand Russel
\n ——————————————
\n“It is not what they take away from you that counts. It’s what
\nyou do with what you have left.”
\n –Hubert Humphrey
\n ——————————————
\n“People who fail to achieve their goals usually get stopped by
\nfrustration. They allow frustration to keep them from taking the
\nnecessary actions that would support them in achieving their
\ndesire. You get through this roadblock by plowing through
\nfrustration, taking each setback as feedback you can learn from,
\nand pushing ahead. I doubt you’ll find many successful people who
\nhave not experienced this. All successful people learn that
\nsuccess is buried on the other side of frustration.”
\n –Anthony Robbins
\n ——————————————
\n“If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn’t
\nlead anywhere.”
\n –Unkn
\n ——————————————
\n“This great misfortune — to be incapable of solitude.”
\n –Jean de la Bruyere
\n ——————————————
\n“There is no such thing as a ‘self-made’ man. We are made up of
\nthousands of others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for
\nus, or spoken one word of encouragement to us, has entered into
\nthe make-up of our character and of our thoughts, as well as our
\nsuccess.”
\n –George Matthew Adams
\n ——————————————
\n“Our lives improve only when we take chances — and the first and
\nmost difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.”
\n –Walter Anderson
\n ——————————————
\n“There are two types of people — those who come into a room and
\nsay, ‘Well, here I am!’ and those who come in and say, ‘Ah, there
\nyou are.'”
\n –Frederick L Collins
\n ——————————————
\n“I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is to
\ntry to please everyone.”
\n –Bill Cosby
\n ——————————————
\n“There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of
\nimproving, and that’s your own self.”
\n –Aldous Huxley
\n ——————————————
\n“I take a simple view of life: keep your eyes open and get on
\nwith it.”
\n –Sir Laurence Olivier
\n ——————————————
\n“The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common.
\nInstead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the
\nfacts to fit their views… which can be very uncomfortable if
\nyou happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.”
\n –from Doctor Who
\n ——————————————
\n“I’m old old enough to play baseball or football. I’m not eight
\nyet. My Mom told me when you start baseball, you aren’t going to
\nbe able to run that fast because you had an operation. I told
\nMom I wouldn’t need to run fast. When I play baseball, I’ll just
\nhit them out of the park. Then I’ll be able to walk.”
\n –Edward J. Mcgrath Jr.
\n ——————————————
\n“It’s possible to fight intolerance, stupidity and fanaticism
\nwhen they come separately. When you get all three together it’s
\nprobably wiser to get out, if only to preserve your sanity.”
\n –P. D. James
\n ——————————————
\n“Is there a home, a home for me?
\n Where the people stay until eternity?
\n Is there a road that winds up, underneath the big green tree?
\n Is there a home, a home for me?”
\n –Stan Ridgway
\n ——————————————
\n“I wanna float with you on a cumulus cloud
\n I wanna take you far away from this maddening crowd
\n You can scratch up my back with your long fingernails
\n We’ll drink some weird wine and eat psychedelic snails.”
\n –Stan Ridgway
\n ——————————————
\n“My angel, my all, my very self… my thoughts go out to you, my
\nImmortal Beloved, now and then joyfully, then sadly, waiting to
\nlearn whether or not fate will hear us — I can live only wholly
\nwith you or not at all… Be calm — love me — today —
\nyesterday — what tearful longings for you — you — you — my
\nlife — my all — farewell. Oh continue to love — never
\nmisjudge the most faithful heart of your beloved. Ever thine.
\nEver mine. Ever ours.”
\n –Ludwig van Beethoven
\n ——————————————
\n“All right, they’re on our left, they’re on our right, they’re in
\nfront of us, they’re behind us. They can’t get away this time!”
\n –General “Chesty” Puller
\n ——————————————
\n“An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind.”
\n –Mohandas Gandhi
\n ——————————————
\n“True morality consists, not in following the beaten track, but
\nin finding out the true path for ourselves and in fearlessly
\nfollowing it.”
\n –Mohandas Gandhi
\n ——————————————
\n“You have no warning when your life’s about to change. No clap
\nof thunder. No sign. Maybe a premonition, a fear, but we’re
\nscared most of the time, aren’t we? So how do you know when it
\nmeans something? How do you know when you’re just not being
\nparanoid?”
\n –from Homicide: Life on the Street
\n ——————————————
\n“He was polite to his elders, who disliked him. Whatever his
\nelders told him to do, he did. They told him to look before he
\nleaped, and he always looked before he leaped. They told him
\nnever to put off until the next day what he could do the day
\nbefore, and he never did. He was told to honour his father and
\nhis mother, and he honoured his father and his mother. He was
\ntold that he should not kill, and he did not kill, until he got
\ninto the Army. Then he was told to kill, and he killed. He
\nturned the other cheek on every occasion and always did unto
\nothers exactly as he would have had others do unto him. When he
\ngave to charity, his left hand never knew what his right hand was
\ndoing. He never once took the name of the Lord his God in vain,
\ncommitted adultery or coveted his neighbour’s ass. In fact, he
\nloved his neighbour and never even bore false witness against
\nhim. [His] elders disliked him because he was such a flagrant
\nnonconformist.” (Catch 22)
\n –Joseph Heller
\n ——————————————
\n“Well, maybe it is true, maybe a long life does have to be filled
\nwith many unpleasant conditions if it’s to seem long. But in
\nthat event, who wants one?” (Catch 22)
\n –Joseph Heller
\n ——————————————
\n“Practice random acts of independence and senseless acts of
\nfreedom.”
\n –Professor Zen
\n ——————————————
\n“Stand up for yourself. If you don’t then why should I?”
\n –Professor Zen
\n ——————————————
\n“I have a novel way to eliminate crime as we know it. Instead of
\npassing sentences of a certain number of years, why don’t we
\neducate the inmates and not let them out until they have
\nmaintained at least a C average from a grade school to a high
\nschool curriculum. Do you know how many people we could actually
\nkeep in prison and for how long? Think about it…”
\n –Professor Zen
\n ——————————————
\n“‘You’ll get over it…’ It’s the clich\uff34 that cause the
\ntrouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life forever.
\nYou don’t get over it because ‘it’ is the person you loved. The
\npain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How
\ncould it? The articularness of someone who mattered enough to
\ngrieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart
\nis in the shape of you and no one else can fit it. Why would I
\nwant them to?” (Body)
\n –Jeanette Winterson
\n ——————————————
\n“Yes we are [friends] and I do like to pass the day with you in
\nserious and inconsequential chatter. I wouldn’t mind washing up
\nbeside you, dusting beside you, reading the back half of the
\npaper while you read the front. We are friends and I would miss
\nyou, do miss you and think of you very often. I don’t want to
\nlose this happy space where I have found someone who is smart and
\neasy and doesn’t bother to check her diary when we arrange to
\nmeet.” (Body)
\n –Jeanette Winterson
\n ——————————————
\n“Poor me. There’s nothing so sweet as wallowing in it is there?
\nWallowing is sex for depressives.” (Body)
\n –Jeanette Winterson
\n ——————————————
\n“I was in the last spasms of an affair with a Dutch girl called
\nInge. She was a committed romantic and an anarcha-feminist.
\nThis was hard for her because it meant she couldn’t blow up
\nbeautiful buildings. She knew the Eiffel Tower was a hideous
\nsymbol of phallic oppression but when ordered by her commander to
\ndetonate the lift so that no-one should unthinkingly scale an
\nerection, her mind filled with young romantics gazing over Paris
\nand opening aerograms that said Je t’aime.” (Body)
\n –Jeanette Winterson
\n ——————————————
\n“Make three wishes and they shall all come true. Make three
\nhundred and I will honour every one.” (Written on the Body)
\n –Jeanette Winterson
\n ——————————————
\n“You will never find time for anything. If you want time you
\nmust make it.”
\n –Charles Buxton
\n ——————————————
\n“We want the facts to fit the preconceptions. When they don’t,
\nit is easier to ignore the facts than to change the
\npreconceptions.”
\n –Jessamyn West
\n ——————————————
\n“Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey ‘people.’
\nPeople say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are
\nat war….Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be
\ngratified at the expense of the rest.”
\n –C. S. Lewis
\n ——————————————
\n“My riches consist not in the extent of my possessions, but in
\nthe fewness of my wants.”
\n –J. Brotherton
\n ——————————————
\n“The purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an
\nopen one.”
\n –Malcom Forbes
\n ——————————————
\n“Our business in life is not to get ahead of others, but to get
\nahead of ourselves – to break our own records, to outstrip our
\nyesterday by our today.”
\n –Stewart B. Johnson
\n ——————————————
\n“Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they’re yours.”
\n –Richard Bach
\n ——————————————
\n“Obviously, where art has it over life is in the matter of
\nediting. Life can be seen to suffer from a drastic lack of
\nediting. It stops too quick, or else it goes on too long.
\nWorse, its pacing is erratic. Some chapters are little more than
\na few sentences in length, while others stretch into volumes.
\nLife, for all its raw talent, has little sense of structure. It
\ncreates amazing textures, but it can’t be counted on for snappy
\nbeginnings or good endings either. Indeed, in many cases no
\nending is provided at all.
\n –Larry McMurtry
\n ——————————————
\n“There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe
\neverything or to doubt everything; both ways save us from
\nthinking.”
\n –Theodore Rubin
\n ——————————————
\n“We must not allow other people’s limited perceptions to define
\nus.”
\n –Virginia Satir
\n ——————————————
\n“Whether they really believe in their brave new world, however,
\nis ultimately beside the point. They’re building it. And in the
\nfriction-free future, jacked into paradise, we’ll have the
\n‘liberty’ of living (or rather, or buying the illusion of
\nliving), through the benevolent offices of a middleman as nearly
\nomnipotent as god himself. Freedom? A more perfect captivity is
\ndifficult to imagine.”
\n –Mark Slouka
\n ——————————————
\n“The future is green and low tech. We’ll watch aquariums, not
\nTVs.”
\n –A. Pavletich
\n ——————————————
\n“We all are where we are because we want to be there.”
\n –from What Happened Was…
\n ——————————————
\n“The future lay sparkling ahead of us and we thought that we’d
\nknow each other forever.”
\n –from Sleepers
\n ——————————————
\n“The most important thing about a man is what he believes in the
\ndepth of his being. This is the thing that makes him what he is,
\nthe thing that organizes him and feeds him; the thing that keeps
\nhim going in the face of untoward circumstances; the thing that
\ngives him resistance and drive.”
\n –Hugh Stevenson Tigner
\n ——————————————
\n“If you don’t have solid beliefs you cannot build a stable life.
\nBeliefs are like the foundation of a building, and they are the
\nfoundation to build your life upon.”
\n –Alfred A. Montapert
\n ——————————————
\n“What orbit of the planets has put you and me in this place, at
\nthis moment? Where time takes a breath, and we dance on the edge
\nof our dreams?”
\n –from a Millennia commercial
\n ——————————————
\n“You know one of the ways that movies are still better than
\nplayback? Because the music comes up, there’s credits, and you
\nalways know when it’s over.”
\n –from Strange Days
\n ——————————————
\n“There’s more to light than the opposite of dark.”
\n –Ric Ocasek
\n ——————————————
\n“There’s a new and virulent cultural virus ripping through the
\nworld… The symptoms of those infected include attacks of
\noptimism, strong feelings of community, lower stress levels and
\noutbreaks of pronoia — the sneaking feeling that someone is
\nconspiring behind their backs to help them.”
\n –Jules Marshall
\n ——————————————
\n“Machines will never be able to give the thinking process a model
\nof thought itself, since machines are not mortal. What gives
\nhumans access to the symbolic domain of value and meaning is the
\nfact that we die.”
\n –R\uff28is Debray
\n ——————————————
\n“The task of thinking is based upon selection and weeding out;
\nremembering everything is weirdly similar to forgetting
\neverything. Most things that people do shouldn’t be remembered.
\nMaybe forgetting is good.”
\n –Gary Wolf
\n ——————————————
\n“May the best from your past be the worst of your future.”
\n –from The Long Kiss Goodnight
\n ——————————————
\n“When you discard arrogance, complexity, and a few other things
\nthat get in the way, sooner or later you will discover that
\nsimple, childlike, and mysterious secret known to those of the
\nUncarved Block: Life is Fun.”
\n –Benjamin Hoff
\n ——————————————
\n“I think that the most important thing to teach children in an
\nenvironmentally conscious age is alternative views of nature.
\nThey must be shown how our interpretation of natural systems is
\noften completely dependent not on what is there but on what kind
\nof box we draw around the data. And if they are going to be
\nsmarter than their parents, then schoolchildren must think
\nsubversively about accepted wisdoms concerning natural systems.”
\n –Stephen Strauss
\n ——————————————
\n“Progress involves risks. You can’t steal second with your foot
\non first.”
\n –Fred Wilcox
\n ——————————————
\n“Don’t save a pitcher for tomorrow. Tomorrow it may rain.”
\n –Leo Durocher
\n ——————————————
\n“It’s like most anything. If you want to be a loser, there’s
\nalways a way to dwell on the negative. If you want to win,
\nthere’s always a way to think positively.”
\n –Tony La Russa
\n ——————————————
\n“If you are content with yourself, you’ll stop taking those
\nlittle steps forward and begin taking big steps backward.”
\n –Greg Maddux
\n ——————————————
\n“Bury me above the clouds, all the way from here
\n Take away the things I need, take away my fear
\n Hide me in a hollow sound, happy ever more
\n Everything I had to give, gave them long before.”
\n –Garbage
\n ——————————————
\n“Crashing silent, broken down, falling into night
\n Who gave up and who gave in, I’ll go without a fight
\n Cut me down or cut me dead, cut me in or out
\n Kiss me blind time after time, take away my doubt.”
\n –Garbage
\n ——————————————
\n“I bit my tongue and stood in line
\n With not much to believe in
\n I bought into what I was sold
\n And ended up with nothing.”
\n –Garbage
\n ——————————————
\n“I only smile in the dark
\n My only comfort is the night gone black
\n I didn’t accidentally tell you that
\n I’m only happy when it rains.”
\n –Garbage
\n ——————————————
\n“A couple things about looking into a mirror: First off, you get
\nto see anybody sneaking up behind you, second, it’s two-
\ndimensional and you don’t get to see the whole of yourself,
\nthird, mirrors are flat and very often cold, fourth, when things
\nget hot and intense, it’s the mirror that steams up, not your
\neyes.”
\n –Greg Webster
\n ——————————————
\n“A couple months ago I noticed that I hadn’t really laughed for a
\nlong time… That’s come back quite well, I’m enjoying more
\nthings… I’d say that I’ve almost completely recovered from the
\npast few years, still cynical, but not really bitter.”
\n –Greg Webster
\n ——————————————
\n“[Alan Berg’s] memory haunts many people, even those who never
\nheard him on the radio, because his death could be read as a
\nmessage: Be cautious, be prudent, be bland, never push anybody,
\nnever say what you really think, offer yourself as a hostage to
\nthe weirdos even before they make the first move. These days, a
\nlot of people are opposed to the newfound popularity of ‘trash
\ntelevision,’ and no doubt they are right, and the hosts of these
\nshows are shameless controversy-mongers. But at least they are
\nnot intimidated. Of what use is freedom of speech to those who
\nfear to offend?”
\n –Roger Ebert
\n ——————————————
\n“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those, who in times
\nof great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”
\n –Dante Alighieri
\n ——————————————
\n“People are usually more firmly convinced that their opinions are
\nprecious than that they are true.”
\n –George Santayana
\n ——————————————
\n“I would step in the way of a bullet if it were aimed at my
\nhusband. It is not self-sacrifice to die protecting that which
\nyou value: If the value is great enough, you do not care to
\nexist without it. This applies to any alleged sacrifice for
\nthose one loves.”
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“Baseball breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart.
\nThe game begins in the spring when everything else begins again,
\nand it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and
\nevenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and
\nleaves you to face fall alone.
\n –A. Bartlett Giamatti<\/p>\n
——————————————
\n“It is always the same: once you are liberated, you are forced
\nto ask who you are.”
\n –Jean Baudrillard
\n ——————————————
\n“Tomorrow isn’t promised to any of us.”
\n –Kirby Puckett
\n ——————————————
\n“Happiness isn’t a static thing; it’s the quest for happiness
\nthat allows us to think we’re happy, while we continue to search
\nfor more.”
\n –Greg Webster
\n ——————————————
\n“We can’t all be Einstein (because we don’t all play the violin).
\nAt the very least, we need a sort of street-smart science: the
\nability to recognize evidence, gather it, assess it, and act on
\nit.”
\n –Judith Stone
\n ——————————————
\n“Over the last decade or so ‘wars’ have been proclaimed, in turn,
\non teen pregnancy, dropping out, drugs, and most recently
\nviolence. The trouble with such campaigns, though, is that they
\ncome too late, after the targeted problem has reached epidemic
\nproportions and taken firm root in the lives of the young. They
\nare crisis intervention, the equivalent of solving a problem by
\nsending an ambulance to the rescue rather than giving an
\ninoculation that would ward off the disease in the first place.
\nInstead of more such ‘wars,’ what we need is to follow the logic
\nof prevention, offering our children the skills for facing life
\nthat will increase their chances of avoiding any and all of these
\nfates.”
\n –Daniel Goldman
\n ——————————————
\n“Functionless art is simply tolerated vandalism.”
\n –Type O Negative
\n ——————————————
\n“That, of course, is the devil’s bargain of addiction: a short-
\nterm good feeling in exchange for the steady meltdown of one’s
\nlife.”
\n –Daniel Goldman
\n ——————————————
\n“What we call human nature in actuality is human habit.”
\n –Jewel Kilcher
\n ——————————————
\n“Why go to a museum and look at paintings if you can paint your
\nown painting. I mean, do things for yourself. I mean, do you
\nhave somebody come in a sleep with your wife for you? Do you pay
\nsomebody to eat your food for you? I mean, do things for
\nyourself. That’s what life’s about. There’s so many people
\ndoing things they hate, I mean you have people running the
\ncountry who all they care about is keeping their jobs not doing
\ntheir jobs. There’s so little real love in any of the work that
\nI see.”
\n –from What Happened Was…
\n ——————————————
\n“To look this way is to see.
\n To see is to have vision.
\n To have vision is to understand.
\n To understand is to know.
\n To know is to become.
\n To become is to live fully.
\n To live fully is to matter.
\n And to matter is to become light.
\n And to become light is to be loved.
\n And to be loved is to burn.
\n And to burn is to exist.
\n Off and on.”
\n –Robert Fulghum
\n ——————————————
\n“If you notice phrases, ideas, and anecdotes that closely
\nresemble those that appear elsewhere in my writing, it’s not a
\nmatter of sloppy editing. I’m repeating myself. I’m reshuffling
\nwords in the hope that just once I might say something exactly
\nright. And I’m still wrestling with dilemmas that are not easily
\nresolved or easily dismissed. I run at them again and again
\nbecause I am not finished with them. Any may never be. Work-in-
\nprogress on a life-in-progress is what my writing is about. And
\nsome progress in the work is enough to keep it going on.”
\n –Robert Fulghum
\n ——————————————
\n“You yourself are in an ecstatic state to such a point that you
\nfeel as though you almost don’t exist. I’ve experienced this
\ntime and again. My hand seems devoid of myself, and I have
\nnothing to do with what is happening. I just sit there watching
\nin a state of awe and wonderment. And it just flows out by
\nitself.”
\n –Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
\n ——————————————
\n“Change is the only thing that you can expect.”
\n –Jaymi Wiley
\n ——————————————
\n“How can you worry about pleasing people [critics] and what
\nthey’re going to think? How can you do anything creative if the
\nwhole thing is motivated by trying to please somebody else? To
\nme, the whole idea of what I thought art, or music, or anything
\ncreative was about pleasing yourself and hoping that whatever
\nyou’re creating will reach someone else who’ll see it on that
\nlevel. To worry about someone picking it apart and discussing it
\nelement for element, and trying to knock you down or weaken it in
\nany way doesn’t amount to anything but a waste of paper.”
\n –Elliot Easton
\n ——————————————
\n“They’re caught where there’s no way out or where you can’t see
\nout. What are you going to do about it? I don’t have the
\nanswer. If I did there would be no insane asylums. But I see a
\nlot of people, a lot of my friends in the same predicament. Many
\ntimes in my life, I was there myself.”
\n –Ric Ocasek
\n ——————————————
\n“There is really nothing you must be.
\n And there is nothing you must do.
\n There is really nothing you must have.
\n And there is nothing that you must know.
\n There is really nothing you must become.
\n However, it helps to understand that fire burns, and when it
\nrains, the earth gets wet…”
\n –Robert Fulghum
\n ——————————————
\n“Making a living and having a life are not the same thing.
\nMaking a living and making a life that’s worthwhile are not the
\nsame thing. Living the good life and living a good life are not
\nthe same thing. A job title doesn’t even come close to answering
\nthe question ‘What do you do?'”
\n –Robert Fulghum
\n ——————————————
\n“Even if there’s no such thing as free will, we have to treat
\neach other as if there were free will in order to live together
\nin society. Because otherwise, every time somebody does
\nsomething terrible, you can’t punish him, because he can’t help
\nit, because his genes or his environment or God made him do it,
\nand every time somebody does something good, you can’t honour him
\nbecause he was a puppet, too. If you think that everybody around
\nyou is a puppet why bother talking to them at all? Why even try
\nto plan anything or create anything, since everything you plan or
\ncreate or desire or dream of is just acting out the script your
\npuppeteer built into you.”
\n –Orson Scott Card
\n ——————————————
\n“The priests say that God created our souls, and that just puts
\nus under the control of another puppeteer. If God created our
\nwill, then he’s responsible for every choice we make. God, our
\ngenes, our environment, or some stupid programmer keying in code
\nat an ancient terminal — there’s no way free will can ever exist
\nif we as individuals are the result of some external cause.”
\n –Orson Scott Card
\n ——————————————
\n“Isn’t it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another
\nwithout trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in
\nour genes that we can never get it out? Territoriality. My
\nwife. My friend. My lover. My outrageous and annoying computer
\npersonality who’s about to be shut off at the behest of a half-
\ncrazy girl with OCD on a planet that I never heard of and how
\nwill I live without [her] when she’s gone?”
\n –Orson Scott Card
\n ——————————————
\n“I have too many secrets. For all these years I’ve been a
\nspeaker for the dead, uncovering secrets and helping people to
\nlive in the light of truth. Now I no longer tell anyone half of
\nwhat I know, because if I told the whole truth there would be
\nfear, hatred, brutality, murder, war.”
\n –Orson Scott Card
\n ——————————————
\n“We’re poor little lambs who’ve lost our way,
\n Baa! Baa! Baa!
\n We’re little black sheep who’ve gone astray,
\n Baa-aa-aa!
\n Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree,
\n Damned from here to Eternity,
\n God ha’ mercy on such as we,
\n Baa! Yah! Bah!”
\n –Rudyard Kipling
\n ——————————————
\n“A strange thing happened then. The Speaker agreed with her that
\nshe had made a mistake that night, and she knew when he said the
\nwords that it was true, that his judgement was correct. And yet
\nshe felt strangely healed, as if simply speaking her mistake were
\nenough to purge some of the pain of it. For the first time,
\nthen, she caught a glimpse of what the power of speaking might
\nbe. It wasn’t a matter of confession, penance, and absolution,
\nlike the priests offered. It was something else entirely.
\nTelling the story of who she was, and then realizing that she was
\nno longer the same person. That she had made a mistake, and the
\nmistake had changed her, and now she would not make the mistake
\nagain because she had become someone else, someone less afraid,
\nsomeone more compassionate.”
\n –Orson Scott Card
\n ——————————————
\n“How clever of me. I have found such a pathway into hell that I
\ncan never get back out.”
\n –Orson Scott Card
\n ——————————————
\n“But I hope that in the lives of [the characters], you will find
\nstories worth holding in your memory, perhaps even in your heart.
\nThat’s the transaction that counts more than best-seller lists,
\nroyalty statements, awards, or reviews. Because in the pages of
\nthis book, you and I will meet one-on-one, my mind and yours, and
\nyou will enter a world of my making and dwell there, not as a
\ncharacter that I control, but as a person with a mind of your
\nown. You will make of my story what you need it to be, if you
\ncan. I hope my tale is true enough and flexible enough that you
\ncan make it into a world worth living in.”
\n –Orson Scott Card
\n ——————————————
\n“The danger that keeps me just a little frightened with every
\nbook I write, however, is that I’ll overreach myself once too
\noften and try to write a story that I’m just plain not talented
\nor skilful enough to write. That’s the dilemma every storyteller
\nfaces. It is painful to fail. But it is far sadder when a
\nstoryteller stops wanting to try.”
\n –Orson Scott Card
\n ——————————————
\n“Remember, you can think for yourself, or just surrender your
\nmind. It’s your call, but don’t expect me to pay your bills if
\nyou decide to surrender.”
\n –Professor Zen
\n ——————————————
\n“You can walk as carefully as you want through a mine field; it
\nis still a mine field. But it’s also true that if you step up to
\nthe plate worrying that you’re going to strike out, the odds are
\nthat you’re going to strike out. Not doing a large ambitious
\nwork because you’re convinced that Danger Lurks Around Every
\nCorner, the old ‘I might be dead this time next year,’ is a waste
\nof the Inner Radiance that found you. It’s like life insurance.
\nIt’s betting against yourself. It’s blowing out your own flame
\nbefore someone beats you to it.”
\n –Dave Sim
\n ——————————————
\n“I think the more rational explanation is that the excision of a
\nfive-to-six-foot leech from the surface of a human body means
\nthat that body is going to have more of its own blood in its own
\nveins. Unless the leech finds another body, it is going to go
\nhungry.”
\n –Dave Sim
\n ——————————————
\n“These are ideas. I could say that they just came to me, but it
\nwould be more accurate to say that I went to them. Ideas — and
\nnew connections between ideas — lead you away from commonly held
\nperceptions of reality. Ideas lead you out here. Ideas lead you
\ninto the darkness.”
\n –Dave Sim
\n ——————————————
\n“Once a profound truth has been seen, it cannot be ‘unseen’.
\nThere’s no ‘going back’ to the person you were. Even if such a
\npossibility did exist… why would you want to?”
\n –Dave Sim
\n ——————————————
\n“The problem is maddening. The thing you seek is so close, you
\nfeel you could reach out and touch it. You feel it is your
\nimmutable destiny to do so. You have not come this far and at
\nsuch a cost merely to turn around and go back. There is a
\nsolution. Of this you are certain. Now, no longer a game of
\nmass, a game of destiny, it has become, instead a contest of
\nwills. You focus on That Which You Seek as if your gaze alone
\nmight bring it closer or narrow the distance between you. Just
\nas it feels as if your mind itself will explode from the
\nstrain…”
\n –Dave Sim
\n ——————————————
\n“For the first time in your conscious memory; for the first time
\nin fact, since your were a baby; a single tear, full and warm,
\nrolled down your right cheek and you fell into a very deep and
\nentirely dreamless slumber…”
\n –Dave Sim
\n ——————————————
\n“A great deal of talent is lost to the world for want of a little
\ncourage. Every day sends to their graves obscure men whom
\ntimidity prevented from making a first effort.”
\n –Sydney Smith
\n ——————————————
\n“All courage is a form of constancy. It is always himself that a
\ncoward abandons first. After this all other betrayals come.”
\n –Cormac McCarthy
\n ——————————————
\n“There is a theory of societal evolution that goes like this:
\nBarbarians invent a new culture. A middle class emerges to
\nmanage and help perpetuate the culture. An aristocracy
\neventually develops out of the middle class and devotes their
\nenergies to making things comfortable for themselves. Finally, a
\nnew set of barbarians smash everything apart and destroy the
\nstatus quo so that the process must start all over again.”
\n –Alan Cross
\n ——————————————
\n“The secret of the world is this: the world is entirely circular
\nand you will go round and round endlessly, never finding what you
\nwant, unless you have found what you really want inside yourself.
\nWhen you follow a star you know you will never reach that star;
\nrather it will guide you to where you want to go. It’s a
\nreference point, not an end in itself, even though you seem to be
\nfollowing it. So it is with the world. It will only ever lead
\nyou back to yourself. The end of all your exploring will be to
\ncease from exploration and know the place for the first time.”
\n –Jeanette Winterson
\n ——————————————
\n“Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of
\nprejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation
\nfrom prejudice.”
\n –Allan Bloom
\n ——————————————
\n“Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the
\nfeelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions
\nmay rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the
\ndesires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgement shall
\nstill have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote
\nin every decision.”
\n –Charlotte Bronte
\n ——————————————
\n“People are governed with the head; kindness of heart is little
\nuse in chess.”
\n –Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort
\n ——————————————
\n“I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable.
\nThere is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the
\nintellect.”
\n –Oscar Wilde
\n ——————————————
\n“And that’s the real incentive, isn’t it? It’s not so much the
\nfact that you get to bask in their God’s love that’s the selling
\npoint, it’s that you avoid damnation. Think of it like Coke
\nputting out an ad that says ‘Snapple causes muscle spasms, Pepsi
\nis infected with AIDS, and tap-water gives you cancer. So drink
\nCoke. Not only do we taste good, we’re the only alternative to
\npain and suffering.’ It’s actually a pretty good marketing tool.
\nHumanity, by nature, is an ambivalent animal, given to fits of
\ninertia, and we’re more than likely to sit on our noncommittal
\nbehinds unless there’s a bogeyman to chase us out of our chairs.”
\n –Greg Bulmash
\n ——————————————
\n“No, life may not be easy, it can be lonely. Full of people we
\nthink we know, but barely comprehend. Yet we must always
\nremember: it’s the challenges that define us best, and the
\nobstacles that illuminate what we’re truly capable of. We must
\nwelcome adversity and embrace struggle, and no matter what we get
\nfrom life, never give less than 100 percent. Of course, at the
\nend of every battle weary day, we fold ourselves into peaceful
\ndarkness and find comfort in those gentle words… good night.”
\n –from Profit
\n ——————————————
\n“I’m pretty good at inventing phrases — you know, the sort of
\nwords that suddenly make you jump, almost as though you’d sat on
\na pin, they seem so new and exciting even though they’re about
\nsomething hypnopaedically obvious. But that doesn’t seem enough.
\nIt’s not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with
\nthem ought to be good too.”
\n –Aldous Huxley
\n ——————————————
\n“I’m thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that
\nI’ve got something important to say and the power to say it —
\nonly I don’t know what it is, and I can’t make any use of the
\npower.”
\n –Aldous Huxley
\n ——————————————
\n“[They] like to pretend they live in a universe where there are
\nno facts, everything is a matter of opinion, and all opinions are
\nequally valid. And, of course, they do live in just such a
\nuniverse. Unfortunately, it exists entirely inside their own
\npoorly-stocked minds.”
\n –Dr. Rory Coker
\n ——————————————
\n“The notion of saving the planet has nothing to do with
\nintellectual honesty or science. The fact is that the planet was
\nhere long before us and will be here long after us. The planet
\nis running fine. What people are talking about is saving
\nthemselves and saving their middle-class lifestyles and saving
\ntheir cash flow.”
\n –Lynn Margulis
\n ——————————————
\n“Welcome to prekindergarten! You will not die if you discover
\nthat there are more lines out there than just your own. In fact,
\nyou’ll discover that you will have an advantage if you know more
\nof them!”
\n –Bernice Johnson Reagon
\n ——————————————
\n“This means that people must somehow get free of this incredible
\nobsession — generated by governments and the economy and the
\nguilt around sex and pleasure — that they must become
\nworkaholics. The workaholic fascination is an illusion and a
\ntrap that people fall into without even realizing it. What’s
\nneeded is more time for inner work, less time for television;
\ndetachment from all the myths we’re steeped in; and the discovery
\nof a language that will create harmony between a man and a
\nwoman.”
\n –Margo Anand
\n ——————————————
\n“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most
\nundesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make
\nwhat amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving
\nbetter next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing.
\nRolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”
\n –Aldous Huxley
\n ——————————————
\n“We’re like a real family. Opinionated, argumentative, holding
\ngrudges, challenging each other. We challenge each other to be
\nbetter than we are. That kind of thing doesn’t happen at
\nbarbecues, at ball games, it happens on the job we’re supposed to
\ndo. On the case. Put down the murder. The work itself is the
\nmost important thing. What we do is important. We speak for
\nthose that can no longer speak for themselves. And you’re not
\ngonna ever find anything like that anywhere. Not in vice, and
\nnot patrolling the grounds at Disneyland.”
\n –from Homicide: Life on the Street
\n ——————————————
\n“When I tell any truth it is not for the sake of convincing those
\nwho do not know it, but for the sake of defending those who do.”
\n –William Blake
\n ——————————————
\n“There are truths which one can only say after having won the
\nright to say them.”
\n –Jean Cocteau
\n ——————————————
\n“Mere longevity is a good thing for those who watch life from the
\nsidelines. For those who play the game, an hour may be a year, a
\nsingle day’s work, an achievement for eternity.”
\n –Gabriel Heatter
\n ——————————————
\n“To see a world in a grain of sand
\n And a heaven in a wild flower,
\n Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
\n And eternity in an hour.”
\n –William Blake
\n ——————————————
\n“Mock the devil, and he will flee from thee.”
\n –Bono
\n ——————————————
\n“I have discovered that this world is harsh, cruel and nasty
\nenough without writing off entire classes of individuals on the
\nbasis of their colour or national origin. There are enough
\npeople in the world who can be judged on the basis of their
\nactions that we don’t need to judge others merely on the basis of
\ntheir colour or nationality.”
\n –Robert Chase
\n ——————————————
\n“What [he] is apparently objecting to is that not everyone takes
\nhis beliefs seriously. Indeed, some don’t seem to respect his
\nbeliefs at all, and actually poke fun at them. Well, I have news
\nfor [him]: that’s the nature of a free society. Opinions don’t
\nnecessarily merit respect; they must earn respect in the
\nmarketplace of ideas.”
\n –Jeffrey Shallit
\n ——————————————
\n“[He] seems to want it both ways: the freedom to hold and
\nexpress beliefs, and immunity from criticism for those beliefs.
\nThis is the kind of attitude that leads inexorably to
\ntotalitarianism. It is to be decried, particularly in a
\nuniversity environment where the search for truth necessitates
\nthat no belief be treated as sacred or above scrutiny.”
\n –Jeffrey Shallit
\n ——————————————
\n“I think it would be nice if you could include a greater slant to
\nthe growing, happy side of your persona — it wouldn’t be too
\nhard to assume (as I erroneously did at first) that you were a
\ndepression-racked, paranoid loony. Not so much from this issue,
\nbut as a general pattern from earlier issues. I’ve learnt,
\nthough. You’re not paranoid.”
\n –Julian Barton
\n ——————————————
\n“If you follow me, I may lead you straight to hell, but if you
\ntrust me, I will lead you back out again.”
\n –Francesco Pfauth
\n ——————————————
\n“We ran out of new ideas somewhere around 1978, since then we’ve
\nbeen repeating ourselves. Same songs, same movies, same clothes,
\neven the same crimes. Like this Robie guy, no imagination. He’s
\njust part of the rhythm and the rhyme of all this repeating.
\nThis is 1996, here comes the millennium. But people are nervous,
\nthey’re on edge, they’re jumpy. This is supposed to be something
\nnew. But we can’t look that in the face, can we? So what do we
\ndo? We grab a little something from one year in the fifties and
\na little of something else from some other year, maybe late
\nsixties. We think we’re creating something new and different,
\nbut really, all we’re doing is just repeating the same old…
\nnothing. We’re all copycats.”
\n –from Homicide: Life on the Street
\n ——————————————
\n“To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent
\npeople and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of
\nhonest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to
\nappreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world
\na bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a
\nredeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed
\neasier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”
\n –Ralph Waldo Emerson
\n ——————————————
\n“No one beneath you can offend you. No one your equal would.”
\n –Jan L. Wells
\n ——————————————
\n“The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with
\nannoying bastards.”
\n –Alexander Jablokov
\n ——————————————
\n“We’re here for a good time, not a long time
\n So have a good time, the sun can’t rise everyday.”
\n –Trooper
\n ——————————————
\n“Knowledge of what is possible is the beginning of happiness.”
\n –George Santayana
\n ——————————————
\n“Ignorance is not bliss — it is oblivion.”
\n –Philip Wylie
\n ——————————————
\n“An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.”
\n –Victor Hugo
\n ——————————————
\n“Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and
\nyour belief will help you create the fact.”
\n –William James
\n ——————————————
\n“Maybe it was mean, but I really don’t think so.
\n You asked for the truth and I told you.”
\n –Sinead O’Connor
\n ——————————————
\n“What a wonderful day we’ve had. You have learned something and,
\nI have learned something. Too bad we didn’t learn it sooner. We
\ncould have gone to the movies instead.”
\n –from Perfect Strangers
\n ——————————————
\n“Minds are for people who think.”
\n –Madman Murdoch
\n ——————————————
\n“Since a rational man’s ambition is unlimited, since his pursuit
\nand achievement of values is a lifelong process — and the higher
\nthe values, the harder the struggle — he needs a moment, an hour
\nor some period of time in which he can experience the sense of
\nhis completed task, the sense of living in a universe where his
\nvalues have been successfully achieved. It is like a moment of
\nrest, a moment to gain fuel to move farther.” (Anthem)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“Many words have been granted me, and some are wise and some are
\nfalse, but only three are holy: ‘I will it!'” (Anthem)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“I know not if this earth on which I stand is the core of the
\nuniverse or if it is but a speck of dust lost in eternity. I
\nknow not and I care not. For I know what happiness is possible
\nto me on earth. And my happiness is not the means to any end.
\nIt is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose.”
\n(Anthem)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish.
\nI am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their
\nneeds. I am not a bandage for their wounds. I am not a
\nsacrifice on their altars.” (Anthem)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“I think one thing we went through was common to a lot of people:
\nYou work your whole life to achieve something, then you achieve
\nit and find out that you still have good days and bad days. So
\nyou start thinking, ‘Is that all there is?’ After a while you
\ncalm down and get back to work.”
\n –Elliot Easton
\n ——————————————
\n“If a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he
\nisn’t fit to live.”
\n –Martin Luther King, Jr.
\n ——————————————
\n“Who would fare better in this world of fitful time? Those who
\nhave seen the future and live only one life? Or those who have
\nnot seen the future and wait to live life? Or those who deny the
\nfuture and live two lives?”
\n –Alan Lightman
\n ——————————————
\n“Most people have learned to live in the moment. The argument
\ngoes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there
\nis no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little
\neffect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for
\ntheir consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time, to be
\njudged on its own. … It is a world of impulse. It is a world
\nof sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks
\njust to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning.”
\n –Alan Lightman
\n ——————————————
\n“Some make light of decisions, arguing that all possible
\ndecisions will occur. In such a world, how could one be
\nresponsible for his actions? Others hold that each decision must
\nbe considered and committed to, that without commitment there is
\nchaos. Such people are content to live in contradictory worlds,
\nso long as they know the reason for each.”
\n –Alan Lightman
\n ——————————————
\n“The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in
\ninjustice and tragedy.”
\n –Richard Bach
\n ——————————————
\n“The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of
\nrespect and joy in each other’s life. Rarely do members of one
\nfamily grow up under the same roof.”
\n –Richard Bach
\n ——————————————
\n“We believed — and I personally still believe — that the so
\ncalled Voice of God narration, ubiquitous in documentaries
\ndestined for PBS, is insulting to the audience. If you believe
\nin the intelligence of your audience, you don’t need to tell them
\nwhat to think and how to process the material they’re seeing.”
\n –Jayne Loader
\n ——————————————
\n“I was accused of every monstrous vice by public rumour and
\nprivate rancour; my name, which had been a knightly or noble one,
\nwas tainted. I felt that, if what was whispered, and muttered,
\nand murmured, was true, I was unfit for England; if false,
\nEngland was unfit for me.”
\n –Lord Byron
\n ——————————————
\n“When indignation takes possession of his mind — and it is
\neasily excited — his disposition becomes malevolent. He hates
\nwith the bitterest contempt. But as soon as he has indulged
\nthose feelings, he regains the humanity which he had lost — from
\nthe immediate impulse of provocation — and repents deeply. So
\nthat his mind is continually making the most sudden transitions –
\n– from good to evil, from evil to good. A state of such
\nperpetual tumult must be attended with the misery of restless
\ninconsistency. He laments his want of tranquillity and speaks of
\nthe power of application to composing studies, as a blessing
\nplaced beyond his attainment, which he regrets.”
\n –Annabella Milbanke
\n ——————————————
\n“You sit around watching all this stuff happen on TV… and the
\nTV sits and watches us do nothing! The TV must think we’re all
\npretty lame.”
\n –Shannon Wheeler
\n ——————————————
\n“I can never get people to understand that poetry is the
\nexpression of excited passion, and that there is no such thing as
\na life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or and
\neternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such
\na state?”
\n –Lord Byron
\n ——————————————
\n“Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and seemingly, that of the
\nwildest odes, [has] a logic of its own as severe as that of
\nscience; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex,
\nand dependent on more and more fugitive causes. In the truly
\ngreat poets… there is a reason assignable, not only for every
\nword, but for the position of every word.”
\n –Samuel Taylor Coleridge
\n ——————————————
\n“[His mind] was like a volcano, full of fire and wealth,
\nsometimes calm, often dazzling and playful, but ever threatening.
\nIt ran swift as the lightning from one subject to another, and
\noccasionally burst forth in passionate throes of intellect,
\nnearly allied to madness.”
\n –Lady Blessington
\n ——————————————
\n“They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape
\nthose who dream only by night. In their grey visions they obtain
\nglimpses of eternity…”
\n –Edgar Allan Poe
\n ——————————————
\n“I see at last that all the knowledge
\n I wrung from the darkness — that darkness flung me —
\n Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing
\n The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness
\n And we call it wisdom. It is pain.”
\n –Randall Jarrell
\n ——————————————
\n“Is getting well ever an art, or art a way to get well?”
\n —-Robert Lowell
\n ——————————————
\n“Writing is a form of therapy. Sometimes I wonder how all those
\nwho do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the
\nmadness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the
\nhuman situation.”
\n –Graham Greene
\n ——————————————
\n“… You don’t like my ‘restless’ doctrines — I should be very
\nsorry if you did — but I can’t stagnate nevertheless — if I
\nmust said let it be on the ocean no matter how stormy — anything
\nbut a dull cruise on a level lake without ever losing sight of
\nthe same insipid shores by which it is surrounded.”
\n –Lord Byron
\n ——————————————
\n“I had hit a critical period in my life, where I changed very
\nmuch as a person. I consider the person I used to be, dead, and
\nI’m glad that he is. Insecure, frightened, confused, much like a
\nlot of people I know today.”
\n –Peter Steele
\n ——————————————
\n“I always think the same thing when I read about someone
\ncommitting suicide. I think, ‘There, but for the grace of God,
\ngo I.’ I think, ‘There’s only a twist of Fate between me and
\nthem.’ I think, ‘It could have been me.’ I think, ‘I hope that
\nI can give someone else a reason to live through today so that he
\nor she will give me a reason to live through tomorrow.'”
\n –Dahven White
\n ——————————————
\n“Opinion is a denial of truth. For if each man is entitled to
\nhis own opinion then there can be nothing which is false,
\nconsequently there can be nothing which is true.”
\n –Andrew Juric
\n ——————————————
\n“Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret
\nweapon. A happiness weapon. A Beauty Bomb. And every time a
\ncrisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in
\nthe air — explode softly — and send thousands, millions, of
\nlittle parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth — boxes
\nof Crayolas. And we wouldn’t go cheap, either — not little
\nboxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built
\nright in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and
\nlime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile
\nand get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world
\nwith imagination.”
\n –Robert Fulghum
\n ——————————————
\n“Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize
\nit, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our
\neyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny,
\ndenigrate, or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What
\nseems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy,
\nand strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a
\ngolden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.”
\n –Henry Miller
\n ——————————————
\n“The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life
\nwhen he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for
\nhimself.”
\n –Archibald MacLeish
\n ——————————————
\n“It is remarkable how much mediocrity we live with, surrounding
\nourselves with daily reminders that the average is acceptable.
\nOur world suffers from terminal normality. Take a moment to
\nassess all of the things around you that promote your being
\n‘average’. These are the things that keep you powerless to go
\nbeyond a ‘limit’ you arbitrarily set for yourself. The first
\nstep to having what your really want is the removal of everything
\nin your environment that represents mediocrity, removing those
\nthings that are limiting. One way is to surround yourself with
\nfriends who ask more of you than you do.”
\n –Stewart Emery
\n ——————————————
\n“I am speaking to those among you who have retained some
\nsovereign shred of their soul, unsold and unstamped: ‘– to the
\norder of others’. If, in the chaos of the motives that have made
\nyou listen to the radio tonight, there was an honest, rational
\ndesire to learn what is wrong with the world, you are the man
\nwhom I wished to address. By the rules and terms of my code, one
\nowes a rational statement to those whom it does concern and who
\nare making an effort to know. Those who are making an effort to
\nfail to understand me, are not a concern of mine.” (Atlas 981)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“Just as I support my life, neither by robbery nor alms, but by
\nmy own effort, so I do not seek to derive my happiness from the
\ninjury or the favour others of , but earn it by my own
\nachievement. Just as I do not consider the pleasure of others as
\nthe goal of my life, so I do not consider my pleasure as the goal
\nof the lives of others. Just as there are no contradictions in
\nmy values and no conflicts among my desires — so there are no
\nvictims and no conflicts of interest among rational men, men who
\ndo not desire the unearned and do not view one another with a
\ncannibal’s lust, men who neither make sacrifice nor accept them.”
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“Honesty is the recognition of the fact that the unreal is unreal
\nand can have no value, that neither love nor fame nor cash is a
\nvalue if obtained by fraud — that an attempt to gain a value by
\ndeceiving the mind of others is an act of raising your victims to
\na position higher than reality, where you become a pawn of their
\nblindness, a slave of their non-thinking and their evasions,
\nwhile their intelligence, their rationality, their perceptiveness
\nbecome the enemies you have to dread and flee — that you do not
\ncare to live as a dependent, least of all a dependent on the
\nstupidity of others, or as a fool whose source of values is the
\nfools he succeeds in fooling — that honesty is not a social
\nduty, not a sacrifice for the sake of others, but the most
\nprofoundly selfish virtue man can practice: his refusal to
\nsacrifice the reality of his own existence to the deluded
\nconsciousness of others.” (Atlas 937)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single
\naxiom: existence exists — and in a single choice: to live.
\nThe rest proceeds from these. To live, man must hold three
\nthings as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason —
\nPurpose — Self-esteem. Reason, as his only tool of knowledge —
\nPurpose, as his choice of the happiness which that tool must
\nproceed to achieve — Self-esteem, as his inviolate certainty
\nthat his mind is competent to think and his person is worth of
\nhappiness, which means: is worthy of living. These three values
\nimply and require all of man’s virtues, and all his virtues
\npertain to the relation of existence and consciousness:
\nrationality, independence, integrity, honesty, justice,
\nproductiveness, pride.” (Atlas 936)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“You who prattle that morality is social and that man would need
\nno morality on a desert island — it is on a desert island that
\nhe would need it most. Let him try to claim, when there are no
\nvictims to pay for it, that a rock is a house, that sand is
\nclothing, that food will drop into his mouth without cause or
\neffort, that he will collect a harvest tomorrow by devouring his
\nstock seed today — and reality will wipe him out, as he
\ndeserves; reality will show him that life is a value to be bought
\nand that thinking is the only coin noble enough to buy it.”
\n(Atlas 936)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“A rational process is a moral process. You may make an error at
\nany step of it, with nothing to protect you but your own
\nseverity, or you may try to cheat, to fake the evidence and evade
\nthe effort of the quest — but if devotion to the truth is the
\nhallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more
\nheroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the
\nresponsibility of thinking.” (Atlas 935)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“No matter how vast your knowledge or how modest, it is your own
\nmind that has to acquire it. It is only with your own knowledge
\nthat you can deal. It is only your own knowledge that you can
\nclaim to possess or ask others to consider. Your mind is your
\nonly judge of truth — and if others dissent from your verdict,
\nreality is the court of final appeal. Nothing but a man’s mind
\ncan perform that complex, delicate, crucial process of
\nidentification which is thinking. Nothing can direct the process
\nbut his own judgement. Nothing can direct his judgement but his
\nmoral integrity.” (Atlas 935)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“But neither life nor happiness can be achieved by the pursuit of
\nirrational whims. Just as man is free to attempt to survive in
\nany random manner, but will perish unless he lives as his nature
\nrequires, so he is free to seek his happiness in any mindless
\nfraud, but the torture of frustration is all he will find, unless
\nhe seeks the happiness proper to man. The purpose of morality is
\nto teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and
\nlive.” (Atlas 932)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those
\nwho claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed
\nthat it belongs to your neighbours — between those who preached
\nthat the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven
\nand those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the
\nsake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your
\nlife belongs to you and that the good is to live it.” (Atlas
\n930)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“The lust that drives others to enslave an empire, had become, in
\nher limits, a passion for power over him. She had set out to
\nbreak him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it
\nby destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus
\nbecome the measure of hers, as if the vandal who smashed a statue
\nwere greater than the artist who had made it, as if the murderer
\nwho killed a child were greater than the mother who had given it
\nbirth.”
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“It’s not that I don’t suffer, it’s that I know the unimportance
\nof suffering, I know that pain is to be fought and thrown aside,
\nnot to be accepted as part of one’s soul and as a permanent scar
\nacross one’s view of existence. Don’t feel sorry for me. It was
\ngone right then.” (Atlas 883)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“Yes… Yes, I feel that there’s no chance for me to exist, if
\nthey do… no chance, no room, no world I can cope with… I
\ndon’t want to feel it, I keep pushing it back, but it’s coming
\ncloser and I know I have no place to run… I can’t explain what
\nit feels like, I can’t catch hold of it — and that’s path of the
\nterror, that you can’t catch hold of anything — it’s as if the
\nwhole world were suddenly destroyed, but not by an explosion —
\nan explosion is something hard and solid — but destroyed by …
\nby some horrible kind of softening … as if nothing were solid,
\nnothing held any shape at all, and you could poke your finger
\nthrough stone walls and the stone would give, like jelly, and
\nmountains would slither, and buildings would switch their shapes
\nlike clouds — and that would be the end of the world, not fire
\nand brimstone, but goo.” (Atlas 819)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“Whenever anyone accuses some person of being ‘unfeeling,’ he
\nmeans that that person is just. He means that that person has no
\ncauseless emotions and will not grant him a feeling which he does
\nnot deserve. He means that ‘to feel’ is to go against reason,
\nagainst moral values, against reality.” (Atlas 818)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“My pride and my power of vision were all that I owned when I
\nstarted — and whatever I achieved, was achieved by means of
\nthem. Both are greater now. Now I have the knowledge of the
\nsuperlative value I had missed: of my right to be proud of my
\nvision. The rest is mine to reach.” (Atlas 793)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“Everything matters!”
\n –from S.F.W.
\n ——————————————
\n“You’ll come back, because yours is an error of knowledge, not a
\nmoral failure, not an act of surrender to evil, but only the last
\nact of being victim to your own virtue. We’ll wait for you and
\nwhen you come back, you will have discovered that there need
\nnever be any conflict among your desires, nor so tragic a clash
\nof values as the one you’ve borne so well.” (Atlas 744)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“If you want to know the one reason that’s taking me back, I’ll
\ntell you: I cannot bring myself to abandon to destruction all
\nthe greatness of the world, all that which was mine and yours,
\nwhich was made by us and is still ours by right — because I
\ncannot believe that men refuse to see, that they can remain blind
\nand deaf to us forever, when the truth is ours and their lives
\ndepend on accepting it. … So long as men desire to live, I
\ncannot lose my battle.” (Atlas 744)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“Don’t consider our interests or desires. You have no duty to
\nanyone but yourself.” (Atlas 740)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“Don’t rely on our knowledge of what’s best for your future. We
\ndo know, but it can’t be best until you know it.” (Atlas 740)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“Consider the reasons which make us certain that we are right,
\nbut not the fact that we are certain. If you are not convinced,
\nignore our certainty. Don’t be tempted to substitute our
\njudgement for your own.” (Atlas 740)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“If any part of your uncertainty, is a conflict between your
\nheart and your mind — follow your mind.” (Atlas 740)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“Did it ever occur to you, that there is no conflict of interests
\namong men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their most
\npersonal desires — if they omit the irrational from their view
\nof the possible and destruction from their view of the practical?
\nThere is no conflict, and no call for sacrifice, and no man is a
\nthreat to the aims of another — if men understand that reality
\nis an absolute not to be faked, that lies do not work, that the
\nunearned cannot be had, that the undeserved cannot be given, that
\nthe destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that
\nwhich isn’t.” (Atlas 736)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power
\nto choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice. If he
\nabdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the
\ngrinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his
\nsphere of existence — by his own choice.” (Atlas 729)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“I want you to observe, that those who cry the loudest about
\ntheir disillusionment, about the failure of virtue, the futility
\nof reason, the impotence of logic — are those who have achieved
\nthe full, exact, logical result of the ideas they preached, so
\nmercilessly logical that they dare not identify it. In a world
\nthat proclaims the non-existence of the mind, the moral
\nrighteousness of rule by brute force, the penalizing of the
\ncompetent in favour of the incompetent, the sacrifice of the best
\nto the worst — in such a world, the best have to turn against
\nsociety and have to become it’s deadliest enemies.” (Atlas 729)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“What I want you to understand, is the full evil of those who
\nclaim to have become convinced that this earth, by its nature, is
\na realm of malevolence where the good has no chance to win. Let
\nthem check their premises. Let them check their standards of
\nvalue. Let them check — before they grant themselves the
\nunspeakable license of evil-as-necessity — whether they know
\nwhat is the good and what are the conditions it requires.”
\n(Atlas 729)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“I sat there beside him till morning — and as I watched his face
\nin the starlight, then the first ray of the sun on his untroubled
\nforehead and closed eyelids, what I experienced was not a prayer,
\nI do not pray, but that state of spirit at which a prayer is a
\nmisguided attempt: a full, confident, affirming self-dedication
\nto my love of the right, to the certainty that the right would
\nwin and that this boy would have the kind of future he deserved.
\n… I did not expect it to be as great as this — or as hard.”
\n(Atlas 727)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“She can live through it, because we do not hold the belief that
\nthis earth is a realm of misery where man is doomed to
\ndestruction. We do not think that tragedy is our natural fate
\nand we do not live in chronic dread of disaster. We do not
\nexpect disaster until we have specific reason to expect it — and
\nwhen we encounter it, we are free to fight it. It is not
\nhappiness, but suffering that we consider unnatural. It is not
\nsuccess, but calamity that we regard as the abnormal exception in
\nhuman life.” (Atlas 700)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“Why should this seem so startling? There is only one kind of
\nmen who have never been on strike in human history. Every other
\nkind and class have stopped, when they so wished, and have
\npresented demands to the world, claiming to be indispensable —
\nexcept the men who have carried the world on their shoulders,
\nhave kept it alive, have endured torture as sole payment, but
\nhave never walked out on the human race. Well, their turn has
\ncome. Let the world discover who they are, what they do and what
\nhappens when they refuse to function. This is the strike of the
\nmen of the mind. This is the mind on strike.” (Atlas 681)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“God help us, ma’am! Do you see what we saw? We saw that we’d
\nbeen given a law to live by, a moral law, they called it, which
\npunished those who observed it — for observing it. The more you
\ntried to live up to it, the more you suffered; the more you
\ncheated it, the bigger reward you got. Your honesty was like a
\ntool left at the mercy of the next man’s dishonesty. The honest
\nones paid, the dishonest collected. The honest lost, the
\ndishonest won. How long could men stay good under this sort of a
\nlaw of goodness?” (Atlas 613)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“A painting is never finished — it simply stops in interesting
\nplaces.”
\n –Paul Gardner
\n ——————————————
\n“I wish I could take language
\n And fold it like cool, moist rags.
\n I would lay words on your forehead.
\n I would wrap words on your wrists.
\n ‘There, there,’ my words would say —
\n Or something better.
\n I would ask them to murmur,
\n ‘Hush’ and ‘Shh, shhh, it’s all right.’
\n I would ask them to hold you all night.
\n I wish I could take language
\n And daub and soothe and cool
\n Where fever blisters and burns,
\n Where fever turns yourself against you.
\n I wish I could take language
\n And heal the words that were the wounds
\n You have no names for.”
\n –Julia Cameron
\n ——————————————
\n“Growth is a spiral process, doubling back on itself, reassessing
\nand regrouping.”
\n –Julia Cameron
\n ——————————————
\n“One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight
\nof the shore for a very long time.”
\n –Andr\ufffd Gide
\n ——————————————
\n“The clock is ticking and you’re hearing the beat. You stop by a
\nmuseum shop, sign your name on a scuba-diving sheet, and commit
\nyourself to Saturday mornings in the deep end. You’re either
\nlosing your mind — or gaining your soul. Life is meant to be an
\nartist date. That’s why we were created.”
\n –Julia Cameron
\n ——————————————
\n“I finally realized that it wasn’t Starfleet that I was trying to
\nget away from. I was trying to escape the pain I felt, after my
\nwife’s death. I thought I could take the uniform, wrap it around
\nthe pain and toss them both away. But it doesn’t work like that.
\nRunning may help for a little while, but sooner or later the pain
\ncatches up with you, and the only way to get rid of it is to
\nstand your ground.”
\n –from Deep Space Nine
\n ——————————————
\n“It is said that [Robin Hood] fought against the looting rulers
\nand returned the loot to those who had been robbed, but that is
\nnot the meaning of the legend which has survived. He is
\nremembered, not as a champion of property, but as a champion of
\nneed, not as a defender of the robbed, but as a provider of the
\npoor. He is held to be the first man who assumed a halo of
\nvirtue by practising charity with wealth which he did not own, by
\ngiving away goods which he had not produced, by making others pay
\nfor the luxury of his pity. He is the man who became the symbol
\nof the idea that need, not achievement, is the source of rights,
\nthat we don’t have to produce, only to want, that the earned does
\nnot belong to us, but the unearned does. He became a
\njustification for every mediocrity who, unable to make his own
\nliving, had demanded the power to dispose of the property of his
\nbetters, by proclaiming his willingness to devote his life to his
\ninferiors at the price of robbing his superiors.” (Atlas 534)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries
\nof being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men
\nthe fire of the gods, he broke his chains and he withdrew his
\nfire — until the day when men withdraw their vultures.” (Atlas
\n480)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“[He] stood motionless, not turning to the crowd, barely hearing
\nthe applause. He stood looking at the judges. There was no
\ntriumph in his face, no elation, only the still intensity of
\ncontemplating a vision with a bitter wonder that was almost fear.
\nHe was seeing the enormity of the smallness of the enemy who was
\ndestroying the devastation, past the ruins of great factories,
\nthe wrecks of powerful engines, the bodies of invincible men, he
\nhad come upon the despoiler, expecting to find a giant — and had
\nfound a rat eager to scurry for cover at the first sound of a
\nhuman step. If this is what has beaten us, he thought, the guilt
\nis ours.” (Atlas 449)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“I could say to you that I have done more good for my fellow man
\nthan you can ever hope to accomplish — but I will not say it,
\nbecause I do not seek the good of others as a sanction for my
\nright to exist, nor do I recognize the good of others as a
\njustification for their seizure of my property or their
\ndestruction of my life. I will not say that the good of others
\nwas the purpose of my work — my own good was my purpose, and I
\ndespise the man who surrenders his. I could say to you that you
\ndo not serve the public good — that nobody’s good can be
\nachieved at the price of human sacrifices — that when you
\nviolate the rights of one man, you have violated the rights of
\nall, and a public of rightless creatures is doomed to
\ndestruction. I could say that you that you will and can achieve
\nnothing but universal devastation — as any looter must, when he
\nruns out of victims. I could say it, but I won’t. It is not
\nyour particular policy that I challenge, but your moral premise.”
\n(Atlas 447)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“I am rich and proud of every penny I own. I made my money by my
\nown effort, in free exchange and through the voluntary consent of
\nevery man I dealt with — the voluntary consent of those who
\nemployed me when I started, the voluntary consent of those who
\nwork for me now, the voluntary consent of those who buy my
\nproduct. I shall answer all the questions you are afraid to ask
\nme openly. Do I wish to pay my workers more than their services
\nare worth to me? I do not. Do I wish to sell my product for
\nless than my customers are willing to pay me? I do not. Do I
\nwish to sell it at a loss or give it away? I do not. If this is
\nevil, do whatever you please about me, according to whatever
\nstandards you hold. These are mine. I am earning my own living,
\nas every honest man must. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact
\nof my own existence and the fact that I must work in order to
\nsupport it. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact that I am able
\nto do it and do it well. I refuse to accept as guilt the fact
\nthat I am able to do it better than most people — the fact that
\nmy work is of greater value than the work of my neighbours and
\nthat more men are willing to pay me. I refuse to apologize for
\nmy ability — I refuse to apologize for my success — I refuse to
\napologize for my money.” (Atlas 446-7)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“Did you ask me to name man’s motive power? Man’s motive power
\nis his moral code. Ask yourself where their code is leading you
\nand what it offers you as your final goal. A viler evil than to
\nmurder a man, is to sell him suicide as an act of virtue. A
\nviler evil than to throw a man into a sacrificial furnace, is to
\ndemand that he leap in, of his own will, and that he build the
\nfurnace, besides. By their own statement, it is they who need
\nyou and have nothing to offer you in return. By their own
\nstatement, you must support them because they cannot survive
\nwithout you. Consider the obscenity of offering their impotence
\nand their need — their need of you — as a justification for
\nyour torture. Are you willing to accept it? Do you care to
\npurchase — at the price of your great endurance, at the price of
\nyou agony — the satisfaction of the needs of your own
\ndestroyers?” (Atlas 423-4)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“All your life, you have heard yourself denounced; not for your
\nfaults, but for your greatest virtues. You have been hated, not
\nfor your mistakes, but for your achievements. You have been
\nscorned for all those qualities of character which are your
\nhighest pride. You have been called selfish for the courage of
\nacting on your own judgement and bearing sole responsibility for
\nyour own life. You have been called arrogant for your
\nindependent mind. You have been called cruel for your unyielding
\nintegrity. You have been called anti-social for the vision that
\nmade you venture upon undiscovered roads. You have been called
\nruthless for the strength and self-discipline of your drive to
\nyour purpose. You have been called greedy for the magnificence
\nof your power to create wealth. You, who’ve expended an
\ninconceivable flow of energy, have been called a parasite. You,
\nwho’ve created abundance where there had been nothing but
\nwastelands and helpless, starving men before you, have been
\ncalled a robber. You, who’ve kept them all alive, have been
\ncalled an exploiter. You, the purest and most moral man among
\nthem, have been sneered at as a ‘vulgar materialist.’ Have you
\nstopped to ask them: by what right? — by what code? — by what
\nstandard?” (Atlas 422-3)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“Did you really think that we wanted those laws to be observed?
\n… We want them broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s
\nnot a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against — then you’ll know
\nthat this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We’re after
\npower and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the
\nreal trick, and you’d better get wise to it. There’s no way to
\nrule innocent men. The only power any government has is the
\npower to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough
\ncriminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a
\ncrime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking
\nlaws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there
\nin that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can
\nneither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted —
\nand you create a nation of law-breakers — and then you case in
\non guilt. Now that’s the system, that’s the game, and once you
\nunderstand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.” (Atlas 406)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“That woman and all those like her keep evading the thoughts
\nwhich they know to be good. You keep pushing out of your mind
\nthe thoughts which you believe to be evil. They do it, because
\nthey want to avoid effort. You do it, because you won’t permit
\nyourself to consider anything that would spare you. They indulge
\ntheir emotions at any cost. You sacrifice your emotions as the
\nfirst cost of any problem. They are willing to bear nothing.
\nYou are willing to bear anything. They keep evading
\nresponsibility. You keep assuming it. But don’t you see that
\nthe essential error is the same? Any refusal to recognize
\nreality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences.
\nThere are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think.
\nDon’t ignore your own desires. Don’t sacrifice them. Examine
\ntheir cause. There is a limit to how much you should have to
\nbear.” (Atlas 389)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“Or did you say it’s the love of money that’s the root of all
\nevil? To love a thing is to know its nature. To love money is
\nto known and love the fact that money is the creation of the best
\npower within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the
\neffort of the best among men. It’s the person who would sell his
\nsoul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of
\nmoney — and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money
\nare willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve
\nit.” (Atlas 384)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon
\nthe source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon
\nyour life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own
\nexistence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to
\nmen’s vices or men’s stupidity? By catering to fools, in the
\nhope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering
\nyour standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers your
\nscorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment’s or a
\npenny’s worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become,
\nnot a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a
\nreminder of shame. Then you’ll scream that money is evil. Evil,
\nbecause it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil,
\nbecause it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the
\nroot of your hatred of money?” (Atlas 384)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth —
\nthe man who would make his own fortune no matter where he
\nstarted. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if
\nnot, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money
\ncorrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not
\nenvy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have
\ndone no better with it. Do not think that it should have been
\ndistributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites
\ninstead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was
\nthe fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root.
\nMoney will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the
\nreason why you call it evil?” (Atlas 384)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of
\nthe weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of
\nguns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to
\nthink. Then is money made by the mad who invents a motor at the
\nexpense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the
\nintelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the
\nexpense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of
\nthe lazy? Money is made — before it can be looted or mooched —
\nmade by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his
\nability. An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume
\nmore than he has produced.” (Atlas 383)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“I think it’s funny. There was a time when men were afraid that
\nsomebody would reveal some secret of theirs that was unknown to
\ntheir fellows. Nowadays, they’re afraid that somebody will name
\nwhat everybody knows. Have you practical people ever though that
\nthat’s all it would take to blast your whole, big, complex
\nstructure, with all your laws and guns — just somebody naming
\nthe exact nature of what you’re doing?” (Atlas 379)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“No longer conscious of my movement, I discovered a new unity
\nwith nature. I had found a new source of power and beauty, a
\nsource I never dreamt existed.”
\n –Roger Bannister
\n ——————————————
\n“What moves men of genius, or rather what inspires their work, is
\nnot new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has
\nalready been said is still not enough.”
\n –Eug\u7a6be Delacroix
\n ——————————————
\n“It’s a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything
\nbut the best, you very often get it.”
\n –W. Somerset Maugham
\n ——————————————
\n“He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is
\nenlightened.”
\n –Lao-tzu
\n ——————————————
\n“Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter
\ndo good things.”
\n –Edgar Degas
\n ——————————————
\n“The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who
\nwant something else more than truth.”
\n –Adrienne Rich
\n ——————————————
\n“Truly, it is in the darkness that one finds the light, so when
\nwe are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.”
\n –Meister Eckhart
\n ——————————————
\n“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”
\n –Jalal ud-Din Rumi
\n ——————————————
\n“When we are really honest with ourselves we must admit our lives
\nare all that really belong to us. So it is how we use our lives
\nthat determines the kind of men we are.”
\n –Cesar Chavez
\n ——————————————
\n“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”
\n –Albert Einstein
\n ——————————————
\n“Who was it that said he needed a fulcrum? Give me an
\nunobstructed right-of-way and I’ll show them how to move the
\nearth!” (Atlas 234)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“The men of the press, who despised their own profession, did not
\nknow why they were enjoying it today. One of them, a young man
\nwith years of notorious success behind him and a cynical look of
\ntwice his age, said suddenly, ‘I know what I’d like to be: I
\nwish I could be a man who covers news!'” (Atlas 223)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“She looked at the crowd and she felt, simultaneously,
\nastonishment that they should stare at her, when this event was
\nso personally her own that no communication about it was
\npossible, and a sense of fitness that they should be here, that
\nthey should want to see it, because the sight of an achievement
\nwas the greatest gift a human being could offer to others.”
\n(Atlas 222)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“… there’s nothing of any importance in life — except how well
\nyou do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are,
\nwill come from that. It’s the only measure of human value. All
\nthe codes of ethics they’ll try to ram down your throat are just
\nso much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of
\ntheir virtues. The code of competence is the only system of
\nmorality that’s on a gold standard.” (Atlas 98)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“[What for] was the first question he asked about any activity
\nproposed to him — and nothing would make him act, if he found no
\nvalid answer. He flew through the days of his summer month like
\na rocket, but if one stopped him in midflight, he could always
\nname the purpose of his every random moment. Two things were
\nimpossible to him: to stand still or to move aimlessly.” (Atlas
\n92-3)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“Francisco could do anything he undertook, he could do it better
\nthan anyone else, and he did it without effort. There was no
\nboasting in his manner and consciousness, no thought of
\ncomparison. His attitude was not: ‘I can do it better than
\nyou,’ but simply: ‘I can do it.’ What he meant by doing was
\ndoing superlatively.” (Atlas 92)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“If that’s the price of getting together, then I’ll be damned if
\nI want to live on the same earth with any human beings! If the
\nrest of them can survive only be destroying us, then why should
\nwe wish them to survive? Nothing can make self-immolation
\nproper. Nothing can give them the right to turn men into
\nsacrificial animals. Nothing can make it moral to destroy the
\nbest. One can’t be punished for being good. One can’t be
\npenalized for ability. If that is right, then we’d better start
\nslaughtering one another, because there isn’t any right at all in
\nthe world!” (Atlas 79)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“It was his Fourth Concerto, the last work he had written. The
\ncrash of its opening chords swept the sights of the streets away
\nfrom her mind. The Concerto was a great cry of rebellion. It
\nwas a ‘NO’ flung at some vast process of torture, a denial of
\nsuffering, a denial that held the agony of the struggle to break
\nfree. The sounds were like a voice saying: There is no
\nnecessity for pain — why, then, is the worst pain reserved for
\nthose who will not accept its necessity? — we who hold the love
\nand the secret of joy, to what punishment have we been sentenced
\nfor it, and by whom? … The sounds of torture became defiance,
\nthe statement of agony became a hymn to a distant vision for
\nwhose sake anything was worth enduring, even this. It was the
\nsong of rebellion — and of a desperate quest.” (Atlas 69)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“I don’t know. But I’ve watched them here for twenty years and
\nI’ve seen the change. They used to rush through here, and it was
\nwonderful to watch, it was the hurry of men who knew where they
\nwere going and were eager to get there. Now they’re hurrying
\nbecause they are afraid. It’s not a purpose that drives them,
\nit’s fear. They’re not going anywhere, they’re escaping. And I
\ndon’t think they know what it is that they want to escape. They
\ndon’t look at one another. They jerk when brushed against. They
\nsmile too much, but it’s an ugly kind of smiling: it’s not joy,
\nit’s pleading. I don’t know what it is that’s happening to the
\nworld.” (Atlas 64)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“The adversary she found herself forced to fight was not worth
\nmatching or beating; it was not a superior ability which she
\nwould have found honour in challenging; it was ineptitude — a
\ngrey spread of cotton that seemed soft and shapeless, that could
\noffer no resistance to anything or anybody, yet managed to be a
\nbarrier in her way. She stood, disarmed, before the riddle of
\nwhat made this possible, she could find no answer.” (Atlas 55-6)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“What did they seek from him? What were they after? He had
\nnever asked anything of them; it was they who wished to hold him,
\nthey who pressed a claim on him — and the seemed to have the
\nform of affection, but it was a form which he found harder to
\nendure than any sort of hatred. He despised causeless affection,
\njust as he despised unearned wealth. They professed to love him
\nfor some unknown reason and they ignored all the things for which
\nhe could wish to be loved. He wondered what response they could
\nhope to obtain from him in such manner — if his response was
\nwhat they wanted. And it was, he though; else why those constant
\ncomplaints, those unceasing accusations about his indifference?
\nWhy that chronic air of suspicion, as if they were waiting to be
\nhurt? He had never had a desire to hurt them, but he had always
\nfelt their defensive, reproachful expectation; they seemed
\nwounded by anything he said, it was not a matter of his words or
\nactions, it was almost… almost as if they were wounded by the
\nmere fact of his being. Don’t start imagining the insane — he
\ntold himself severely, struggling to face the riddle with the
\nstrictest of his ruthless sense of justice. He could not condemn
\nthem without understanding; and he could not understand.” (Atlas
\n42-3)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“You’re not sorry. You could’ve been here if you made the
\neffort. But when did you ever make an effort for anybody but
\nyourself? You’re not interested in any of us or in anything we
\ndo. You think if you pay the bills, that’s enough, don’t you?
\nMoney! That’s all you know. And all you give us is money. Have
\nyou even given us any time?” (Atlas Shrugged 40)
\n –Ayn Rand
\n ——————————————
\n“No trumpets sound when the important decisions of our life are
\nmade. Destiny is made known silently.”
\n –Agnes de Mille
\n ——————————————
\n“The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is
\nboundless.”
\n –Jean-Jacques Rousseau
\n ——————————————
\n“To the rationally minded the mental processes of the intuitive
\nappear to work backwards.”
\n –Frances Wickes
\n ——————————————
\n“Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what people fear
\nmost.”
\n –Fyodor Dostoyevski
\n ——————————————
\n“I’ve noticed that a lot of people consider ‘finding yourself’ to
\nbe a really frivolous and unproductive study. I’m not sure why.
\nEverything important in life really seems to get down-played so
\nchildren can be encouraged to join the rat race and make as much
\nmoney as possible, instead of being told that they should be
\nhappy first.”
\n –Sanjay Singh
\n ——————————————
\n“The problem with keeping up with the Jones’ is that it creates a
\nworld full of Jones’.”
\n –Julian Barton
\n ——————————————
\n“… whether your name is Gehrig, or Ripken, DiMaggio, or
\nRobinson, or that of some youngster who picks up his bat or puts
\non his glove, you are challenged by the game of baseball to do
\nyour very best, day in and day out, and that’s all I’ve ever
\ntried to do.”
\n –Cal Ripken Jr.
\n ——————————————
\n“Trust in yourself. Your perceptions are often far more accurate
\nthan you are willing to believe.”
\n –Claudia Black
\n ——————————————
\n“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it you will land among the
\nstars.”
\n –Les Brown
\n ——————————————
\n“Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or
\nhow. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The
\nartist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we
\ntake leap after leap in the dark.”
\n –Agnes de Mille
\n ——————————————
\n“I feel drunk but I’m sober
\n I’m young and I’m underpaid
\n I’m tired but I’m working, yeah.
\n I care but I’m restless
\n I’m here but I’m really gone
\n I’m wrong and I’m sorry, baby.
\n What it all comes down to
\n Is that everything’s gonna be quite alright.”
\n –Alanis Morissette
\n ——————————————
\n“So let me get this straight. You want to fly on a magic carpet
\nto see the King of the Potato People and plead with him for your
\nfreedom, and you’re telling me you’re completely sane?”
\n –from Red Dwarf
\n ——————————————
\n“Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of
\nthe worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do
\nwill ever be good enough — that we should try harder.”
\n –Julia Cameron
\n ——————————————
\n“When an actor is in the moment, he or she is engaged in
\nlistening for the next right thing creatively. When a painter is
\npainting, he or she may begin with a plan, but that plan is soon
\nsurrendered to the painting’s own plan. This is often expressed
\nas ‘The brush takes the next stroke.’ In dance, in composition,
\nin sculpture, the experience is the same: we are more the
\nconduit than the creator of what we express.”
\n –Julia Cameron
\n ——————————————
\n“Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is
\nnecessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is
\ndestructive. In the middle category, however — that of the
\nunnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury,
\nexuberance, etc.”
\n –Ursula K. LeGuin
\n ——————————————
\n“They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not
\nbarbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society,
\nbut I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without
\nmonarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock
\nexchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb.
\nYet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet
\nshepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less
\ncomplex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit,
\nencouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness
\nas something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil
\ninteresting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to
\nadmit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If
\nyou can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to
\npraise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to
\nlose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold, we can
\nno longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.
\nHow can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not
\nnaive and happy children — though their children were, in fact
\nhappy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose
\nlives were not wretched.”
\n –Ursula K. LeGuin
\n ——————————————
\n“Il a mis le caf\ufffd
\n Dans la tasse
\n Il a mis le lait
\n Dans la tasse de caf\ufffd
\n Il a mis le sucre
\n Dans le caf\ufffd au lait
\n Avec la petite cuiller
\n Il a tourn\ufffd
\n Il a bu le caf\ufffd au lait
\n Et il a repos\ufffd la tasse
\n Sans me parler.”
\n[He put the coffee in the cup. He put the milk in the cup of
\ncoffee. He put the sugar in the white coffee, with the tea-
\nspoon, he stirred. He drank the white coffee and he put the cup
\ndown. Without speaking to me.]
\n –Jacques Pr\uff37ert
\n ——————————————
\n“Leap, and the net will appear.”
\n –Julia Cameron
\n ——————————————
\n“Always leave enough time in your life to do something that makes
\nyou happy, satisfied, even joyous. That has more of an effect on
\neconomic well-being than any other single factor.”
\n –Paul Hawken
\n ——————————————
\n“Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to
\nhave more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they
\nwant so that they will be happier. The way it actually works is
\nthe reverse. You must first be who you really are, then, do what
\nyou need to do, in order to have what you want.”
\n –Margaret Young
\n ——————————————
\n“It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it
\nis because we do not dare that they are difficult.”
\n –Seneca
\n ——————————————
\n“Eliminate something superfluous from your life. Break a habit.
\nDo something that makes you feel insecure.”
\n –Piero Ferrucci
\n ——————————————
\n“Each painting has its own way of evolving… When the painting
\nis finished, the subject reveals itself.”
\n –William Baziotes
\n ——————————————
\n“Take your life in your own hands and what happens? A terrible
\nthing: no one to blame.”
\n –Erica Jong
\n ——————————————
\n“I have made my world and it is a much better world than I ever
\nsaw outside.”
\n –Louise Nevelson
\n ——————————————
\n“We will discover the nature of our particular genius when we
\nstop trying to conform to our own or to other people’s models,
\nlearn to be ourselves, and allow our natural channel to open.”
\n –Shakti Gawain
\n ——————————————
\n“A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.”
\n –Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
\n ——————————————
\n“The universe will reward you for taking risks on its behalf.”
\n –Shakti Gawain
\n ——————————————
\n“Learn to get in touch with the silence within yourself and know
\nthat everything in this life has a purpose.”
\n –Elisabeth K\uff5cler-Ross
\n ——————————————
\n“All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel
\nheat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the
\nbones are moving easily under the flesh.”
\n –Doris Lessing
\n ——————————————
\n“Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and
\nwhispers, ‘grow, grow.'”
\n –The Talmud
\n ——————————————
\n“I am often mad, but I would hate to be nothing but mad: and I
\nthink I would lose what little value I may have as a writer if I
\nwere to refuse, as a matter of principle, to accept the warming
\nrays of the sun, and to report them, whenever, and if ever, they
\nhappen to strike me.”
\n –E. B. White
\n ——————————————
\n“I was always matching wits with authority. Pondering over my
\npast and present hassles, I began to wonder why my life had taken
\nthe direction it had. What cosmic forces had led me to this
\nprecise moment that saw me, once again, dancing on the rim of the
\nvolcano? The answers started to come to me as my life flashed
\nbefore my eyes. I think it all started when I was arrested as a
\npyromaniac.”
\n –Bill Lee
\n ——————————————
\n“It’s no wonder that our priorities got screwed up. Just because
\na person can throw a ball harder or hit it further than most
\nordinary human beings, he is placed on a pedestal at an early
\nage. I don’t think there is anything wrong with admiring an
\nexceptionally skilled person, but the hero-worship we shower on
\nathletes goes beyond that. This is a part of the tribal
\ninfluence handed down by our ancestors. Man has always been
\nlionized for his physical prowess. An Indian brave did not have
\nto pass a math quiz in order to become a chief, he just had to
\ntear the ass of some bear. And the twelve labours of Hercules
\ndid not include a Regents’ exam. Society has tended to find its
\nheroes in the most obvious arenas, and I don’t regard that as a
\nhealthy thing. We should find our heroes in the bathroom mirror
\neach and every morning.”
\n –Bill Lee
\n ——————————————
\n“Alcohol is like anything else. It’s only as bad as the person
\nit’s being poured into. If it’s used to heighten an occasion, or
\nto take an edge off stress, I don’t see a problem. Trouble
\nstarts when you either lose control and let the bottle run you,
\nor when you believe its promises of immortality. You realize
\nthat no matter how much you punish yourself, you always seem to
\nwake up the next day. Pretty soon you’re convinced that you will
\nnever die. What that happens I guess it is time to look for help
\nbefore you life becomes one long, lost weekend.
\n –Bill Lee
\n ——————————————
\n“During those moments on the pitching rubber, when you have every
\npitch at your command working to its highest potential, you are
\nyour own universe. For hours after the game, this sense of
\ncompleteness lingers. Then you sink back to what we humorously
\nrefer to as reality. Your body aches and your muscles cry out.
\nYou feel your mortality. That can be a difficult thing to
\nhandle. I believe pitchers come in touch with death a lot sooner
\nthan other players. We are more aware of the subtle changes
\ntaking place in our body and are unable to overlook the tell-tale
\nhints that we are not going to last on this planet forever.
\nEvery pitcher has to be a little bit in love with death. There’s
\na subconscious fatalism there.”
\n –Bill Lee
\n ——————————————
\n“I stopped watching the game and sat back to watch the fans. It
\nwas like watching a Fassbinder film, depicting mankind at its
\nmost berserk. The experience made me wonder if we’re not
\nbreeding a society that lacks self-esteem. I don’t think we pat
\npeople on the back enough, letting them know that being able to
\nfix a sink is just as much skill as being able to get Rod Carew
\nout with the bases loaded. And more worthwhile, if you were to
\nask me. People must be made to feel their value. Otherwise,
\nwhen they discover they can’t find any thrills in religion or in
\ncults, they head out to the ballpark, seeking a vicarious sense
\nof fulfilment. They’re tired of long-term reality; they don’t
\nrecognize what it has to offer them. All they want is one good
\nfantasy. Realizing that really shook me up.”
\n –Bill Lee
\n ——————————————
\n“I don’t get upset over things I can control, because if I can
\ncontrol them there’s no sense in getting upset. And I don’t get
\nupset over things I can’t control, because if I can’t control
\nthem there’s no sense in getting upset.”
\n –Mickey Rivers
\n ——————————————
\n“There’s a saying that no man is an island, which I completely
\ndisagree with. I believe that a man should be self-sufficient.
\nWhat I propose is almost socialistic, almost communistic: Each
\nperson should have his own plot of land and grow their food.
\nThey should each have a civil service job and contribute equally.
\nIf you don’t contribute then you don’t eat and you die. Don’t be
\na burden on those people that are breaking their backs to work.”
\n –Peter Steele
\n ——————————————
\n“Whether left or right, when views get that extreme then they
\nbecome warped and open to the sickness of the person holding
\nthem.”
\n –Peter Steele
\n ——————————————
\n“I know what you’re going to say! ‘They are men, and men should
\nbe free.’ A free man is dangerous to himself and everyone else.
\nFreedom should be left to those who can put it to good use…”
\n –Dave Sim
\n ——————————————
\n“You just gotta keep going on. Get up, and do your job. Go to
\nwork, get through each day, one day at a time, like that. And
\nyou hope that one day, you’ll get up and it’ll hurt a little
\nless. You just gotta just get through it. You just go on. It’s
\nthat simple.”
\n –from Homicide: Life on the Street
\n ——————————————
\n“All I want is to be back where things make sense. Where I won’t
\nhave to be afraid all the time. Only one thing stops me. A
\npromise I made…”
\n –from The Shawshank Redemption
\n ——————————————
\n“What do you really want to know? Am I sorry for what I did?
\nThere’s not a day goes by I don’t feel regret. Not because I’m
\nin here, but because you think I should be. I look back on the
\nway I was. A young, stupid kid that committed that terrible
\ncrime. I want to talk to him. I want to try to talk some sense
\nto him. Tell him the way things are. But I can’t. That kid’s
\nlong gone, and this old man is all that’s left.”
\n –from The Shawshank Redemption
\n ——————————————
\n“I’ve had some long nights in the stir. Alone in the dark, with
\nnothing but your thoughts, time can draw out like a blade. That
\nwas the longest night of my life.”
\n –from The Shawshank Redemption
\n ——————————————
\n“It floats around, it’s got to land on somebody. It was my turn,
\nthat’s all. I was in the path of the tornado. I didn’t expect
\nthe storm would last as long as it has.”
\n –from The Shawshank Redemption
\n ——————————————
\n“Gone is the blinding glow in his hands — gone, too, is the
\nillusion of purity and beauty! In it’s place all that remains is
\nmind-numbing, spine-chilling reality!”
\n –Dave Sim
\n ——————————————
\n“When I start the book, I’m The Writer. The writer bitches for a
\nweek about how he never has any fun, he’s tired of being funny
\nall the time, and nobody cares about him anyhow. This is
\nfollowed by a period of deep intense silence, much staring at
\nwalls, punctuated by cheery optimism on the order of: ‘That’s
\nit! I’m Dead! I can’t think of an ending!’ or ‘I’m just going
\nto have to scrap the first ten pages — they’re lousy.’ Often it
\nis less coherent than that — reduced to the more succinct,
\n‘Garbage! It’s all GARBAGE!'”
\n –Dave Sim
\n ——————————————
\n“Life moves pretty fast, if you don’t stop and look around once
\nin a while, you could miss it.”
\n –from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
\n ——————————————
\n“I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the
\ndeath, your right to say it.”
\n –Voltaire
\n ——————————————
\n“All the world’s a stage, and the men and women merely players.
\nThey have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his
\ntime plays many parts.”
\n –William Shakespeare
\n ——————————————
\n“Forgive you enemies, but never forget their names.”
\n –John F. Kennedy
\n ——————————————
\n“Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible.”
\n ——————————————
\n“The truth is an anagram of an anagram.”
\n –Umberto Eco
\n ——————————————
\n“Floating, falling, sweet intoxication
\n Touch me, trust me, savour each sensation.
\n Let the dream begin, let you darker side give in.”
\n –from The Phantom of the Opera
\n ——————————————
\n“It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a
\nwarning to others.”
\n ——————————————
\n“You know, I got a daughter, she lives in Michigan. When she was
\nsix years old we took her to the circus, one minute she’s
\nlaughing at the clowns, you know, getting out of the Volkswagon.
\nThe next minute she’s telling me that her stomach hurts. Soon
\nshe’s crying, then she’s screaming. We drove her right to the
\nemergency room, and she’s got a fever, it’s too high. The
\ndoctors poke and prod, and still they can’t find anything wrong.
\nNow her vital signs weaken, and they put her on an IV and they
\nstill can’t find anything wrong. Not anything. One day I walked
\ninto her room, and the nurse was trying to put in a new IV and
\nshe couldn’t find the spot. Her little veins were weak, and
\n[she] starts getting afraid of the needle, and she looked up at
\nme and said ‘Daddy, make it better.’ I can’t you how I felt,
\nwhen she looked up at me and said that, I couldn’t make it
\nbetter. There was nothing I could do. She was my daughter and I
\nwas so powerless. I felt so powerless.”
\n –from Homicide: Life on the Street
\n ——————————————
\n“Have you ever noticed, detective, that there are people in this
\nworld who can tell stories, but they’re not the ones that write
\nthem? People don’t grow wealthy or powerful through virtue or
\nintelligence or hard work, though those things do figure in.
\nThey grow wealthy and powerful because they know how to take
\nwhat’s in front of them and shape it, and use it.”
\n –from Under Suspicion
\n ——————————————
\n“Writing will be your companion through the darkest and brightest
\ndays of your life — if that is what you want. It exposes pain
\nand guilt and the greatest joy. It is your own assessment of who
\nyou are. You should write as much as you can and as much as you
\nwant to. It will be something to turn to.”
\n –Sharda Tarachandra
\n ——————————————
\n“You can never run away from a weakness. You must sometime fight
\nit or perish, and if that be so, why not now, and where you
\nstand?”
\n –Robert Louis Stevenson
\n ——————————————
\n“At first he thought he felt bad because he was afraid of leading
\nan army, but it wasn’t true. He knew he’d make a good commander.
\nHe felt himself wanting to cry. He hadn’t cried since the first
\nfew days of homesickness after he got here. He tried to put a
\nname on the feeling that put a lump in his throat and made him
\nsob silently, however much he tried to hold it down. He bit down
\non his hand to stop the feeling, to replace it with pain. It
\ndidn’t help.”
\n –Orson Scott Card
\n ——————————————
\n“Ender stepped under the water and rinsed himself, took the sweat
\nof combat and let it run down the drain. All gone, except they
\nrecycled it and we’ll be drinking Bonzo’s blood water in the
\nmorning. All the life gone out of it, but his blood just the
\nsame, his blood and my sweat, washed down in their stupidity or
\ncruelty or whatever it was that made them let it happen.”
\n –Orson Scott Card
\n ——————————————
\n“There was no doubt now in Ender’s mind. There was no help for
\nhim. Whatever he faced, now and forever, no one would save him
\nfrom it. Peter might be scum, but he had been right, always
\nright; the power to cause pain is the only power that matters,
\nthe power to kill and destroy, because if you can’t kill then you
\nare always subject to those who can, and nothing and no one will
\never save you.”
\n –Orson Scott Card
\n ——————————————
\n“Whether he likes it or not, [he] cannot remain incognito
\nforever. He has outraged too many wise men and pleased too many
\nfools to hide behind his too-appropriate order to assume
\nleadership of the forces of stupidity he has marshalled, or his
\nenemies will unmask him in order to better understand the disease
\nthat has produced such a warped and twisted mind.”
\n –Orson Scott Card
\n ——————————————
\n“Well, I’m your man. I’m the bloody bastard you wanted when you
\nhad me spawned. I’m your tool, and what difference does it make
\nif I hate the part of me that you most need? What difference
\ndoes it make that when the little serpents killed me in the game,
\nI agreed with them, and was glad.”
\n –Orson Scott Card
\n ——————————————
\n“I’ll put it bluntly. Human beings are free except when humanity
\nneeds them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe
\nhumanity needs me — to find out what you’re good for. We might
\nboth do despicable things, but if humankind survives, then we
\nwere good tools.”
\n –Orson Scott Card
\n ——————————————
\n“This is the essence of the transaction between storyteller and
\naudience. The ‘true’ story is not the one that exists in my
\nmind; it is certainly not the written words on the bound paper
\nthat you hold in your hands. The story in my mind is nothing but
\na hope; the text of the story is the tool I created in order to
\ntry to make that hope a reality. The story itself, the true
\nstory, is the one that the audience members create in their
\nminds, guided and shaped by my text, but then transformed,
\nelucidated, expanded, edited, and clarified by their own
\nexperience, their own desires, their own hopes and fears.”
\n –Orson Scott Card
\n ——————————————
\n“… All these readers have placed themselves inside this story,
\nnot as spectators, but as participants, and so have looked at the
\nworld, not with my eyes only, but also with their own.”
\n –Orson Scott Card
\n ——————————————
\n“[It] was written and sold. I knew it was a strong story because
\nI cared about it and believed in it. I had no idea that it would
\nhave the effect it had on the audience. While most people
\nignored it, of course, and continue to live full and happy lives
\nwithout reading it or anything else by me, there was still a
\nsurprisingly large group who responded to the story with some
\nfervency.”
\n –Orson Scott Card
\n ——————————————
\n“I don’t pray anymore. I used to, I used to pray for answers. A
\nclue, a sign of what I should do. How to find something precious
\nin this life. There was a time when I thought it was my work, my
\njob, but is it? Nothing in this world changes because of what I
\ndo. The hurt goes on and on. God has given up on us. He
\ndoesn’t hear us anymore…”
\n –from Homicide: Life on the Street
\n ——————————————
\n“Singers attract fans with aspects to their own personality.
\nPeople feel I’m passionate and obsessive. They know this isn’t a
\nprofession for me, it’s a vocation. It’s not an egotistical
\nthing, but something else. I’m in a dialogue with my audience,
\nand that’s something I need.”
\n –Morrissey
\n ——————————————
\n“Passivity is the culprit. Think of yourself as the victim, you
\nbecome the victim.”
\n –from Law & Order
\n ——————————————
\n“When I was very young, I went to a grade school in New York City
\ncalled Saint Bart’s for Boys. We used to call it the fortress,
\nthat’s because the outside of the building looked like a medieval
\nfort. But in fact, it was an oasis, right in the middle of my
\nneighbourhood. The brothers and sisters were very strict, you
\nknow, my butt caught the bamboo more than a few times. But I
\ndidn’t hate it. I didn’t hate it. Those rules made me feel
\nimportant, they made me feel worth protecting. I felt safe. And
\nthen I went to a Jesuit high school, Saint Ignatius. The Jesuits
\ntaught me how to think, I haven’t felt safe since.”
\n –from Homicide: Life on the Street
\n ——————————————
\n“I don’t want to hope anymore, I almost died from this in the
\nfirst place, and I don’t want to get that down again.”
\n –Lisa Neve
\n ——————————————
\n“And we laughed, at the world.
\n They can have their diamonds,
\n And we’ll have our pearls.”
\n –Jill Sobule
\n ——————————————
\n“In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.”
\n –from Terminator 2
\n ——————————————
\n“It was a truly discomforting state. The world seemed distant,
\nas though he were looking at it through smoky glass. Sounds were
\neerily muted, even those of the traffic outside and a cat in the
\nalley under his window. His sense of touch was obscured as well,
\nas if he were wearing oven mitts. He had difficulty remembering
\nanything clearly. It was a little bit like being really, really
\ndrunk, with the room spinning around and a feeling like had
\nstepped away from the world. Except that the dimness made it
\nfeel as if the world were trying to pull away from him.
\nEverything but death and loss seemed uncertain. Death and loss
\nwere the only constants in his life.”
\n –Don Bassingthwaite
\n ——————————————
\n“There was too much noise. Sirens from police cars and
\nambulances. Shouts from the crowd on the street eighteen floors
\nbelow. Traffic from other streets and all of the noises of San
\nFrancisco. Mostly, though, there were the voices. Whispering to
\nhim. Reminding him of the dark things he had done — all of the
\nlittle things he had forgotten, all of the big things he had
\ntried to forget. Mostly they reminded him of his biggest secret,
\na betrayal of trust and friendship long ago. He squeezed his
\neyes shut as if that could somehow keep the voices away.”
\n –Don Bassingthwaite
\n ——————————————
\n“For the past weeks I’d been reacting. That was no way to win.
\nTo win, you take the initiative. You instigate the action. You
\nmake the opponent react to you.”
\n –Richard Marcinko
\n ——————————————
\n“When you fight, you don’t fight for abstract values like the
\nflag, or the nation, or democracy. You fight for your buddy.
\nYou fight to keep him alive, and he fights to keep you alive, and
\nyou go on that way, day after day, battle after battle. And when
\none of your buddies dies, something inside you dies as well. But
\nyou go on. You fight, so that his death isn’t meaningless, his
\nsacrifice isn’t for nothing.”
\n –Richard Marcinko
\n ——————————————
\n“Your politics are your’s. You’ve never thrown in. The minute
\nyou do that, their doctrines become your’s. You can be held
\nresponsible.”
\n –from The X-Files
\n ——————————————
\n“I just want to be happy, and I’m so afraid that I never will
\nbe.”
\n –from E.R.
\n ——————————————
\n“Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be
\nchanged until it is faced.”
\n –James Baldwin
\n ——————————————
\n“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change
\nthe world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
\n –Margaret Mead
\n ——————————————
\n“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”
\n –Mohandas Gandhi
\n ——————————————
\n“Science is a body of truths which offers clear and certain
\nknowledge about the real world and is therefore superior to
\ntradition, philosophy, religion, dogma, and superstition which
\noffer shadowy knowledge about an ideal world.”
\n –Donald DeMarco
\n ——————————————
\n“You ruined my life. I lost my wife, my kid, my work. I lost
\neverything all because of a little bad luck. You gotta pay for
\nthat man, you gotta pay. Otherwise there’s no justice in this
\nworld, otherwise it’s all meaningless. You can’t just do
\nsomething, and then pretend you didn’t, that it didn’t happen,
\nthat somehow you weren’t involved. You were, you did. It’s your
\nfault. And now you gotta die for it.”
\n –from Homicide: Life on the Street
\n ——————————————
\n“He had regrets, of course, but not so many that he would lose
\nany sleep over them. Life surprised him now and then and he
\ndidn’t much care for surprises, unless he was passing them out.
\nBut — what was to be done? You had to deal with the reality, he
\nhad learned that over the years, no matter how much you didn’t
\nlike it.”
\n –Steve Perry
\n ——————————————
\n“Did that myth at the heart of all the fairy tales her mother had
\ntold her, that part about happily ever after, ever really work
\nout that way? How many children around the galaxy had been given
\nthat pretty picture, had swallowed it entire, only to grow up and
\nfind that reality was not so simple, not so beautiful, not so
\neasy? The story didn’t end when the brave princess killed the
\nwicked queen and rescued the prince. That, she was learning, was
\nthe easy part. The hard part came when the guns were cleaned and
\nreholstered, the bodies of the villains cremated, and the day-to-
\nday business of life reared its ugly cobra’s head and grinned
\ndown at you. When your prince had doubts you couldn’t answer for
\nhim, when you had doubts he could only shrug at, that, that was
\nthe hard part. That was the part the stories hadn’t addressed.”
\n –Steve Perry
\n ——————————————
\n“You know what it is that makes a leader? Sacrifice. Sacrifice
\nyourself and men will follow you anywhere.”
\n –from Back in Action
\n ——————————————
\n“You know, everyday I get out of bed and drag myself to the next
\ncup of coffee. I take a sip and the caffeine kicks in. I can
\nfocus my eyes again. My brain starts to order the day. I’m up,
\nI’m alive. I’m ready to rock. But the time is coming when I
\nwake up and decide that I’m not getting out of bed. Not for
\ncoffee, or food, or sex. If it comes to me, fine. If it won’t,
\nfine. No more expectations. The longer I live the less I know.
\nI should know more, I should know the coffee’s killing me.
\nYou’re suspicious of your suspicions? I’m jealous. I’m so
\njealous. You still have the heart to have doubts. Me? I’m
\ngoing to lock up a 14 year old kid for what could be the rest of
\nhis natural life. I got to do this. This is my job. This is
\nthe deal. This is the law. This is my day. I have no doubts or
\nsuspicions about it. Heart has nothing to do with it anymore.
\nIt’s all in the coffee.”
\n –from Homicide: Life on the Street
\n ——————————————
\n“Why did you make it so hard for me? I’d rather empty the ocean
\nwith a sieve. I do it for you. Or count the grains of sand on
\nevery beach. All for you. There are so many people, so many
\ncountries. But I have time. All the time in the world.
\nEternity.”
\n –Grant Morrison
\n ——————————————
\n“And when it’s all done, when there’s no one left you’ll come
\nback for me. And tell me who I am and why I have to do what I
\ndo. And explain ‘Eternity.’ You’ll come back.”
\n –Grant Morrison
\n ——————————————
\n“Why am I in Hell? It hurts. It hurts all the time. Why am I
\nin Hell? I just want to go home and lie on the bed the way I
\nused to. Please take me home.”
\n –Grant Morrison
\n ——————————————
\n“Paintings may not have nearly the power to convert people that
\nthe printed or spoken word has, but each man has his part to play
\nin the human and divine drama — some persons just a few lines,
\nothers whole pages. To refuse to play one’s role at all is not
\nthe answer. It is better to light one candle than to curse the
\ndarkness.”
\n –William Kurelek
\n ——————————————
\n“Days of my life I’d like to forget: The day the doctors told me
\nI was sick. The day I had to tell my friends I was ill. The day
\nmy hair fell out. The first day after my surgery. They’re also
\nthe days I’ll always remember.”
\n –Kate Sawford
\n ——————————————
\n“Do not look for rest in any pleasure, because you were not
\ncreated for pleasure: you were created for Joy. And if you do
\nnot know the difference between pleasure and joy you have not yet
\nbegun to live.”
\n –Thomas Merton
\n ——————————————
\n“More than any other time in history, humanity faces a
\ncrossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness.
\nThe other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom
\nto choose correctly.”
\n –Woody Allen
\n ——————————————
\n“Opera once was an important social instrument — especially in
\nItaly. With Rossini and Verdi people were listening to opera
\ntogether and having the same catharsis with the same story, the
\nsame moral dilemmas. They were holding hands in the darkness.
\nThat has gone. Now perhaps they are holding hands watching
\ntelevision.”
\n –Luciano Berio
\n ——————————————
\n“People are brave enough to spit into an open wound, the problem
\nis that they’re so afraid, that they’ll only do it after the
\nbeast is dead.”
\n –Sanjay Singh
\n ——————————————
\n“Keep staring at the stars and someday they will collapse.”
\n –James J. Montgomery
\n ——————————————
\n“Soaks my skin — through to the bone
\n Pain is nothing that a downpour won’t erase
\n Rain — you can’t hold on to it
\n A treasure you cannot frame
\n Rain — somehow I’m drawn to it
\n I feel engaged, one and the same
\n When heaven’s dressing beads off my face
\n The pain is nothing that a downpour won’t erase.”
\n –Delerium
\n ——————————————
\n“I was born to fight your brand of order!”
\n –from The Adventures of Batman & Robin
\n ——————————————
\n“You actually care about those creatures, you’re just as crazy as
\nthey are.”
\n –from The Adventures of Batman & Robin
\n ——————————————
\n“I’ve seen how you treat your prisoners. Forgotten and scared
\nwithout hope or compassion.”
\n –from The Adventures of Batman & Robin
\n ——————————————
\n“The morning sun rises to greet him, and in its low, warm light
\nhe stands like some sort of pagan god, or deposed tyrant, staring
\nout over the city he’s sworn to… stare out over. And it’s
\nevident, just by looking at him that he’s got some pretty heavy
\nthings on his mind.”
\n –from The Tick
\n ——————————————
\n“We cannot go ahead without leaving something behind.”
\n –Lemuel K. Washburn
\n ——————————————
\n“It is harder to live when those we love are dead.”
\n –Lemuel K. Washburn
\n ——————————————
\n“There is no sadder grief than that which lies at the bottom of a
\nlife that has been wrecked through deception.”
\n –Lemuel K. Washburn
\n ——————————————
\n“Have a good time, make life cheerful and bright, dance if you
\nwant to, sing if you can, play as long as you live and leave the
\nworld with a smile.”
\n –Lemuel K. Washburn
\n ——————————————
\n“To correct in ourselves what we condemn in others would remove
\nmost of the evils of life.”
\n –Lemuel K. Washburn
\n ——————————————
\n“History shows that there is nothing so easy to enslave and
\nnothing so hard to emancipate as ignorance, hence it becomes the
\ndouble enemy of civilization. By its servility it is the prey of
\ntyranny, and by its credulity it is the foe of enlightenment.”
\n –Lemuel K. Washburn
\n ——————————————
\n“The statue of liberty that will endure on this continent is not
\nthe one made of granite or bronze, but the one made of love of
\nfreedom.”
\n –Lemuel K. Washburn
\n ——————————————
\n“I saw you with your envoy
\n A consenting adult
\n Technique in moderation
\n But vogue to the cult
\n Me I’ve got my strangers
\n To exile in the night
\n I guess I’m just addicted
\n To the pain of delight.”
\n –Melissa Etheridge
\n ——————————————
\n“Go on and close your eyes, go on imagine me there
\n She’s got similar features with longer hair
\n And if that’s what it takes to get you through
\n Go on and close your eyes it shouldn’t bother you.”
\n –Melissa Etheridge
\n ——————————————
\n“I was about to tell him he was wrong to dwell on it, because it
\nreally didn’t matter. But he cut me off and urged me one last
\ntime, drawing himself up to his full height and asking me if I
\nbelieved in God. I said no. He sat down indignantly. He said
\nit was impossible; all men believed in God, even those who turn
\ntheir backs on him. That was his belief, and if he were ever to
\ndoubt it, his life would become meaningless. ‘Do you want my life
\nto be meaningless?’ he shouted. As far as I could see, it didn’t
\nhave anything to do with me, and I told him so. But from across
\nthe table he had already thrust the crucifix in my face was
\nscreaming irrationally, ‘I am a Christian. I ask Him to forgive
\nyou for sins. How can you not believe that He suffered for you?’
\nI was struck by how sincere he seemed, but I had had enough. It
\nwas getting hotter and hotter. As always, whenever I want to get
\nrid of someone I’m not really listening to, I made it appear as
\nif I agreed. To my surprise, he acted triumphant. ‘You see, you
\nsee!’ he said. ‘You do believe, don’t you, and you’re going to
\nplace your trust in Him, aren’t you?’ Obviously, I again said
\nno. He fell back in his chair”
\n –Albert Camus
\n ——————————————
\n“It’s very hard to let someone in when you’ve caused so much
\npain. To risk the emotion.”
\n –from Forever Knight
\n ——————————————
\n“Just one more time to touch you
\n Just one more time to tell you
\n You’re on my mind
\n Baby, why can’t I have you
\n You’re breaking my heart in two
\n You know what I’m going through
\n Oh baby, why can’t I have you?”
\n –The Cars
\n ——————————————
\n“Who’s gonna tell you when it’s too late
\n Who’s gonna tell you things aren’t so great
\n You can’t go on, thinking nothing’s wrong
\n Who’s gonna drive you home, tonight?<\/p>\n
Who’s gonna pick you up when you fall
\n Who’s gonna hang it up when you call
\n Who’s gonna pay attention to your dreams
\n Who’s gonna plug their ears, when you scream?”
\n –The Cars
\n ——————————————
\n“You see with your eyes. This means you can be misled by charm,
\nby outward appearance. By webs of glamour, by surface pretences.
\nI do not see with my eyes. I see good and I see evil. Nothing
\nelse.”
\n –Neil Gaiman
\n ——————————————
\n“I do not permit affection, or lack thereof, to influence my
\nactions. There is good, and there is evil. The good must be
\nprotected; the evil eradicated. I have shown you the triumph of
\nevil, as a caution.”
\n –Neil Gaiman
\n ——————————————
\n“You wish to see the distant realms? Very well. But know this
\nfirst, the places you will visit, the places you will see, do not
\nexist. For there are only two worlds — your world, which is the
\nreal world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this one,
\nworlds of the human imagination. Their reality, or lack of
\nreality is not important. What is important is that they are
\nthere. These worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape.
\nProvide a threat. Provide a dream, and power, provide refuge and
\npain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus
\nthey are all that matters. Do you understand?”
\n –Neil Gaiman
\n ——————————————
\n“There aren’t any good guys, and there aren’t any bad guys.
\nThere’s just us. People. Doing our best to get by.”
\n –Neil Gaiman
\n ——————————————
\n“People kill what they fear. They burned, and drowned, and
\nhanged those they saw as witches, the devil’s servants: the wise
\nwomen and the cunning men, the unfortunate, the lost and the
\nstrange.”
\n –Neil Gaiman
\n ——————————————
\n“The red flame flickers on the wall of the cave
\n (smeared with ochre, berry dye, charcoal)
\n Making the great elk move,
\n Making the mastodon breath,
\n Making the hunters race and kill.<\/p>\n
Watch them seeking to placate and understand the world above
\n This they know.
\n This they understand.
\n There is darkness, everywhere, outside.<\/p>\n
The dark is everywhere; and though the sun comes up,
\n And though the fires blossom and are tamed,
\n The darkness is there,
\n The darkness is waiting.<\/p>\n
As the things in the darkness
\n That whisper before they feast,
\n They are to be placated and persuaded,
\n They are to be loved and sacrificed to,
\n They are to be prayed to and distrusted.<\/p>\n
And so there is magic.”
\n –Neil Gaiman
\n ——————————————
\n“Living is easy with eyes closed
\n Misunderstand all you see
\n It’s getting hard to be someone but it all works out
\n It doesn’t matter much to me.”
\n –The Beatles
\n ——————————————
\n“Pain. I started cuttings on myself when I was quite young. The
\nbacks of my arms. I did it with a knife. I didn’t learn it from
\nanyone. It was the way I knew I was alive and human. At the time
\nI hadn’t developed enough to understand why I was doing it.”
\n –Greta, body piercer
\n ——————————————
\n“There were times in my life when I couldn’t feel anything any
\nmore. Everything became too much. I felt numb all the time. I
\ncouldn’t feel happy or sad.”
\n –Greta, body piercer
\n ——————————————
\n“Girls ask to suck my blood. They aren’t too shy about asking
\nme. I can easily show you scars all over me where I’ve taken
\nrazor blades and opened myself up and let them stick their
\ntongues into me.”
\n –Peter Steele
\n ——————————————
\n“For a long time, I did not know who I was, I did not know what I
\nwanted. I was crushed by peer pressure, and I listened to a lot
\nof people because I was told by a lot of people around me that I
\nwas a moron. And now I’ve realized that it’s not me that’s
\nfucked up. It is the rest of the world. I’m certainly not a
\ngenius but I believe I’ve found myself.”
\n –Peter Steele
\n ——————————————
\n“I think I’m a blue-collar worker from Brooklyn. This thing just
\nfell into my lap and it is an opportunity to escape urban blight.
\nI’m a social retard, and I have a hard time dealing with people.
\nI don’t like crowds, I don’t like noise, I don’t like people, I
\ndon’t like being questioned. I just want to be left alone.”
\n –Peter Steele
\n ——————————————
\n“Censorship is almost systematically the weapon of first resort
\nfor governments in uncertain political situations. So not only
\nare the famous writers and bold journalists in danger; at every
\nlevel of public and private life, the freedoms to think, read or
\nwrite are denied.<\/p>\n
In the absence of a free press, other human rights abuses
\nflourish unabated. Nothing is reported, criticized, questioned.
\nThe example of imprisonment, torture or execution imposes a
\nfurther silence. A blindly obedient mob mentality is encouraged,
\ndriven by extremist religious or ethnic loyalties. The citizens
\ndo not know what is happening. Fear and ignorance permeate
\ndiscussion.”
\n –Marian Botsford Fraser
\n ——————————————
\n“To start blindly with a statement is a sign of arrogance and
\nnarrow-mindedness, and will lead to conflict. To start blindly
\nwith a question is a sign of uncertainty and honesty, and will
\nlead to wisdom.”
\n –Scott “Jesus” Watson
\n ——————————————
\n“You’ve seen [angst] (you know you have) late at night, in a
\nmirror. It has deep, hollow eyes — too exhausted to close —
\nand looks like someone you thought you knew.”
\n –Dirk John Fischer
\n ——————————————
\n“Wake when others wake. Take what others take.
\n Feed when others feed. Need what others need.
\n Share what others share. Care when others care.
\n Feel what others feel. Is it real?<\/p>\n
If you love what others love. You will never rise above.
\n You will stay where others stay. Play games they like to play.<\/p>\n
And when they grow tired, you will fall asleep.
\n Because to follow is the nature of the sheep.”
\n –Luke Gasteiger
\n ——————————————
\n“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from
\ntime to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”
\n –Oscar Wilde
\n ——————————————
\n“True education makes for inequality; the inequality of
\nindividuality, the inequality of success, the glorious inequality
\nof talent, of genius; for inequality, not mediocrity, individual
\nsuperiority, not standardization, is the measure of the progress
\nof the world.”
\n –Felix E. Schelling
\n ——————————————
\n“Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape
\nof the spoon.”
\n –E. M. Forster
\n ——————————————
\n“The paradox of education is precisely this — that as one begins
\nto become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he
\nis being educated.”
\n –James Baldwin
\n ——————————————
\n“It is very nearly impossible… to become an educated person in
\na country so distrustful of the independent mind.”
\n –James Baldwin
\n ——————————————
\n“The real leader has no need to lead — he is content to point
\nthe way.”
\n –Henry Miller
\n ——————————————
\n“The art of leadership… consists in consolidating the attention
\nof the people against a single adversary and taking care that
\nnothing will split up that attention… The leader of genius must
\nhave the ability to make different opponents appear as if they
\nbelonged to one category.”
\n –Adolf Hitler
\n ——————————————
\n“I read the news today oh boy
\n About a lucky man who made the grade
\n And though the news was rather sad
\n Well I just had to laugh
\n I saw the photograph.
\n He blew his mind out in a car
\n He didn’t notice that the lights had changed
\n A crowd of people stood and stared
\n They’d seen his face before
\n Nobody was really sure
\n If he was from the House of Lords.”
\n –The Beatles
\n ——————————————
\n“Fear, it’s the oldest tool of power. If you’re distracted by
\nfear of those around you, it keeps you from seeing the actions of
\nthose above.”
\n –from The X-Files
\n ——————————————
\n“Reporters crowd around you house,
\n Going through you garbage like a pack of hounds
\n Speculating what they might find out,
\n It don’t matter now, you’re all washed up.<\/p>\n
You wake up in the middle of the night
\n You sheets are wet and your face is white,
\n You tried to make a good thing last,
\n How could something so good, go bad, so fast.”
\n –Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young
\n ——————————————
\n“There was thunder
\n There was lightning
\n Then the stars went out
\n And the moon fell from the sky…”
\n –Tom Waits
\n ——————————————
\n“I’m just hoping that one day the sheep will realize that the
\nshepherd is really a wolf in disguise.”
\n –Sanjay Singh
\n ——————————————
\n“Fifty or sixty shooters had already arrived and managed to look
\nstudiously bored. I knew a few of them and nodded politely. No
\none asked me to sit next to them, nor would I have accepted if
\nthey had. It’s better that way, in case you end up on opposite
\nsides of a fight, and a whole lot safer. Friends can betray you.
\nStrangers can’t.”
\n –William C. Deitz
\n ——————————————
\n“You thought you knew what pain was. You thought that whatever
\nhappened, you could handle it. You thought that you were in
\ncontrol. You thought wrong. Now you’ve lost it all. She’s
\ngone. All that’s left is the numbing pain. You have to let go
\nto stop the pain, but you can’t. It’s like a drug to you now.
\nYou don’t want to need it, but it has become a part of you, and
\nit won’t loosen its grip on you. The control you once fought
\nfor, is gone. You have no control. And you just don’t care.”
\n –Sanjay Singh
\n ——————————————
\n“You’ve bought into the ‘system’ your whole life, and it got you
\nnowhere. You were at the top of your class in high school, you
\nwere the darling of your sorority, and people still treated you
\nlike your success was a way to prove their ‘system’ was right.
\nNo more. You get by on your own… with the help of someone who
\nworks for you now.”
\n –from Wraith: The Oblivion
\n ——————————————
\n“The world is his canvas, and he wants to take up sculpting.”
\n –from Wraith: The Oblivion
\n ——————————————
\n“You are inspired. Anything you say is brilliant, especially if
\nit contradicts what other people normally believe. Create!
\nDestroy! Live!”
\n –from Wraith: The Oblivion
\n ——————————————
\n“[He] does not belong; reality itself does not accept his surreal
\nvisions. Why hold back? Why shouldn’t he reshape the world into
\nsomething that will accept him? He’s been shut out long enough.”
\n –from Wraith: The Oblivion
\n ——————————————
\n“Obviously, [she] should learn a little about reality. True love
\ndoes not conquer all. How foolish she is to believe in ‘young
\nlove.’ Stories like that always end in tears. Her romance
\ncertainly did. Seeing young lovers most [her], because it
\nreminds her of her own pain — the pain her Psyche and her need
\nfor blissful passion gave her.”
\n –from Wraith: The Oblivion
\n ——————————————
\n“The true artist must be open to anything! Expand your mind,
\nman; stretch it like a big red balloon! You think that’s crazy!
\nLook at all the unhappy people, look at all the conformity, and
\nI’ll tell you what’s really crazy. Whee! Ants!”
\n –from Wraith: The Oblivion
\n ——————————————
\n“One must follow what interests one, yes? Life is an exploration
\nof the mind, an exploration of reality. Care for some brie?”
\n –from Wraith: The Oblivion
\n ——————————————
\n“They found the dog in several pieces in the trash can, occult
\nsymbols carved into its fur and something horrible in its mouth.
\nThey found the old man hanging from the ceiling in his study, the
\nplastic on the floor was arranged so that none of the blood
\nstained the lily white carpet. They discovered the child hunched
\ndown in a closet covered in her own waste, the tears dried away,
\nthe hollow eyes looking out at nothing.<\/p>\n
They say not to go into the Fifth Street alley at night — it’s
\njust not safe. They say that the library is haunted — that
\nsometimes you can feel the crinkle of plastic under your feet.
\nBut you don’t care what they say, ’cause you know she’s in your
\ncloset — when you close your eyes to sleep you can still hear
\nher muffled screams and the little hands beating at the door…”
\n –from Wraith: The Oblivion
\n ——————————————
\n“This thing is a man. Look at what you are, and what awaits you.
\nGaze on this image and learn what your own end will be.”
\n –Greek epitaph
\n ——————————————
\n“Learn the true topography; the monstrous and wonderful
\narchetypes are not inside you, not inside your consciousness; you
\nare inside them, trapped and howling to get out.”
\n –R. A. Lafferty
\n ——————————————
\n“I see the witching moon moving in swift arc, yet not driving
\nwith her full face shining night long like torchlight luring in a
\ngraveyard. She glows as when magicians spells torment her reins
\ntaught. She holds course, hogging the horizon moon. Now your
\nfire has hues of deathly pallor. Pour waves of grim light on the
\nwinds to frighten mankind.<\/p>\n
On grass red with bloodstains, I offer your beasts ritually
\nbutchered for you a fire torch snatched from a cremation burns in
\nthe night; for you I arch and toss back my head. I sing, I loose
\nmy hair, then bind it with sacred headband, and they do at
\nfunerals. For you I grip this bough shrivelled with deaths dew.
\nFor you I bare my breast, slice into my arms with holy knife,
\nshed my sanity and blood forever.”
\n –from Wraith: The Oblivion
\n ——————————————
\n“Death is but a stepping over, a passage through the Shroud. The
\nmoment of death is a rite of passage marking the end of one
\njourney and the beginning of another, a path available to us at
\nany time.<\/p>\n
The thousands of things undone, the millions of roads not
\ntravelled, the longings and regrets; they do not die with the
\nbody. Instead they linger on and take a life of their own. They
\nbecome ghosts. They become shadows.<\/p>\n
Trapped between this world and the next, wraiths are lost in the
\nimmortal gloom of damnation. Held together out of pure misery,
\nthey are trapped by their past, their longings and their fear.
\nMany are the products of sudden, violent or cruel deaths. They
\nare bound by a sense of crucial deeds undone, of unsaid words
\nbreaking in their hearts, of a life cut short by Fate. Others
\nare consumed by a tragic longing for happiness and fulfilment
\ndenied them in life. A few are driven by bitterness, anger or
\npassionate ideals.”
\n –from Wraith: The Oblivion
\n ——————————————
\n“I can’t feel you anymore
\n I can’t even touch the books you’ve read
\n I followed you beneath the stars
\n Hounded by your memory
\n And all your raging glory
\n But now I’m finally free
\n I kiss good-bye the howling beast
\n That separated you from me
\n You’ll never know the hurt I suffered
\n Nor the pain I rise above
\n And I’ll never know the same about you,
\n But soon we’ll be together
\n In the clasp of oblivion.”
\n –from Wraith: The Oblivion
\n ——————————————
\n“The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life’s joy.
\nOne can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when
\none has accepted death, not as contrary to life, but as an aspect
\nof life. Life in its becoming is always shedding death, and on
\nthe point of death. The conquest of fear yields the courage of
\nlife. That is the cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure
\n— fearlessness and achievement.”
\n –Joseph Campbell
\n ——————————————
\n“With each passing day oblivion encroaches further. With every
\nsoul that surrenders to shadow, the end draws nearer. The world
\nis not as we knew it, decay’s sweet stench now clings to all we
\nonce held dear. It is called the Shadowlands. In death there is
\nnowhere to hide, nowhere to run, from the hate and fear, the pain
\nand bitterness, the shadow within. Hope is fragile and few have
\nthe courage, the passion, to face death, and say, ‘I do not go
\ngentle into that good night.'”
\n –from Wraith: The Oblivion
\n ——————————————
\n“Like you, I am broken and fragile
\n Like you, I am tasting my heart for the first time
\n Like you, I am feeding on slumber
\n Like you, I’ve left my eyes far behind me
\n Down for the count and still drowning…”
\n –Christian Death
\n ——————————————
\n“You may never understand
\n How the stranger is inspired
\n For he is always evil,
\n And he is not always wrong…”
\n –Billy Joel
\n ——————————————
\n“Come with me on wings of dream. I can take you anywhere you
\nwant to go — would you like to have dinner with [her]? Sip
\ncappuccino on the canals of Mars? Walk with me though the
\nElysian Fields? I promise to have you back before you wake.”
\n –from Wraith: The Oblivion
\n ——————————————
\n“All around you reverberate the songs of the dead. You hear them
\nechoing in high cathedrals, in darkened auditoriums, in your own
\nsleep. All around you wail the songs of the dead: dare you not
\nlisten? Listen to what has been sung. Since their death!”
\n –from Wraith: The Oblivion
\n ——————————————
\n“‘Do you trust me?’ I asked her. I held out my hand. ‘Do you
\nwant to see beyond the darkness?’ She nodded slowly, and took my
\nhand…”
\n –from Wraith: The Oblivion
\n ——————————————
\n“Swift as light and as cheers was the idea that broke in upon me.
\n‘I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; I need
\nonly describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.'”
\n –Mary Shelly
\n ——————————————
\n“I act the role in classic style of a martyr
\n Carved with a twisted smile,
\n To bleed the lyric for this song
\n To write the rites to right my wrongs
\n An epitaph to a broken dream
\n To exorcise tis silent scream
\n A scream that’s borne from sorrow.”
\n –Marillion
\n ——————————————
\n“Oh children don’t you weep and moan
\n Children save your breath
\n You’ll draw a pretty pension
\n When your daddy meets his death.”
\n –“Hard Times” (traditional ballad)
\n ——————————————
\n“It was the best of times and the worst of times, and it was all
\nof them at once.”
\n –Alan Moore
\n ——————————————
\n“Death followed by eternity… the worst of both worlds. It is a
\nterrible thought.”
\n –from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
\n ——————————————
\n“There were the days when you peered into your self, into the
\nsecret places of your heard, and what you saw there made you fair
\nwith horror. And then, next day, you didn’t know what to make of
\nit, you couldn’t interpret the horror you had glimpsed the day
\nbefore. Yes, you know what evil costs.”
\n –Jean-Paul Sartre
\n ——————————————
\n“The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound — and yet he
\nsometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard subside and
\nallow him to hear certain other fainter noises which he suspected
\nwere lurking behind them.”
\n –H.P. Lovecraft
\n ——————————————
\n“Darkness, darkness
\n Be my blanket
\n Cover me with the endless night
\n Take away the pain of knowing.”
\n –The Youngbloods
\n ——————————————
\n“The night is my companion, and solitude my guide.”
\n –Sarah McLaughlin
\n ——————————————
\n“He who pretends to look upon death without fear, lies.”
\n –Jean-Jacques Rousseau
\n ——————————————
\n“Someone stole my heart. I haven’t gotten it back, because I
\nhaven’t found anyone to steal it back for me.”
\n –Scott “Jesus” Watson
\n ——————————————
\n“Justice to the left of you
\n Justice to the right
\n Speak when you are spoken to
\n Don’t pretend you’re right
\n This life’s not for living
\n It’s for fighting and for wars
\n No matter what the truth is
\n Hold on to what is yours.”
\n –Yes
\n ——————————————
\n“Sometimes you want to run away
\n Sometimes you think you do
\n But you never had a dream like this before
\n And you don’t want to ask for more
\n Sometimes you leave a mark
\n Before you know the score.”
\n –Ric Ocasek
\n ——————————————
\n“The great challenge of adulthood is holding on to your idealism
\nafter you lose your innocence.”
\n –Bruce Springsteen
\n ——————————————
\n“A life is not important, except in the impact it has on other
\nlives.”
\n –Jackie Robinson
\n ——————————————
\n“I see your face in every flame
\n With no answers I have only myself to blame
\n Of all the women I have known — they’re not you
\n I’d rather be alone.”
\n –Type O Negative
\n ——————————————
\n“I always thought we’d be together
\n And that our love could not be better
\n Well with no warning you were gone
\n I still don’t know what went wrong
\n You don’t know what I’ve been through
\n Just want to put my love in you.”
\n –Type O Negative
\n ——————————————
\n“So you’ve come to say you’re very sorry
\n ‘It won’t happen again — forgive me?’
\n Time will not heal these wounds
\n And I’m bleeding because of you.<\/p>\n
Was everything we had just a joke?
\n I’ve run out of patience, tears, and hope
\n Love does not conquer all
\n And I’m screaming because of you.<\/p>\n
In the shadow of the light from a black sun
\n Frigid statue standing icy blue and numb
\n Where are the frost giants I’ve begged for protection?
\n I’m freezing.”
\n –Type O Negative
\n ——————————————
\n“A crimson pool so warm and deep
\n Lulls me to an endless sleep
\n You hand in mine — I will be brave
\n Take me from this earth
\n An endless night — this, the end of life
\n From the dark I feel your lips
\n And I taste your bloody kiss.”
\n –Type O Negative
\n ——————————————
\n“Not long ago but far away
\n A rainy winter’s day
\n All her pain she kept inside
\n Could no longer hide
\n No cry for help
\n She killed herself
\n Both life and love could not be saved
\n She took them both to the grave.”
\n –Type O Negative
\n ——————————————
\n“See the smile awaitin’ in the kitchen
\n Food cookin’ and the plates for two
\n Feel the arms that reach out to hold me
\n In the evening when the day is through.”
\n –Seals & Crofts
\n ——————————————
\n“See the curtains hangin’ in the window
\n In the evening on a Friday night
\n A little light-a-shinin’ through the window
\n Let’s me know everything’s all right.”
\n –Seals & Crofts
\n ——————————————
\n“It’s not that I don’t have a conscience, it’s just that why
\nshould I feel guilty for my present crimes, when my past ones are
\nso much worse?”
\n –Sanjay Singh
\n ——————————————
\n“The Humanist lives as if this world were all and enough. He is
\nnot otherworldly. He holds that the time spent on the
\ncontemplation of a possible afterlife is time wasted. He fears
\nno hell and seeks no heaven, save that which he and others
\ncreated on earth. He willingly accepts the world that exists on
\nthis side of the grave as the place for moral struggle and
\ncreative living. He seeks the life abundant for his neighbour as
\nfor himself. He is content to live one world at a time and let
\nthe next life — if such there may be — take care of itself. He
\nneed not deny immortality; he simply is not interested. His
\ninterests are here.”
\n –Edwin H. Wilson
\n ——————————————
\n“Gentleness and cheerfulness, these come before all morality:
\nthey are the perfect duties. If your morals make you dreary,
\ndepend on it they are wrong. I do not say, ‘give them up,’ for
\nthey may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they
\nshould spoil the lives of better men.”
\n –Robert Louis Stevenson
\n ——————————————
\n“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, does<\/p>\n
