2023 update: This feels like a very dated post now. I think my goal moving forward is to weave all my favorite quotes into my body of work. I’ve already done this to some extent, and I’d like to be more deliberate about it. It is nice to revisit, though.

“if you meet a conan on the road , conan kills you.” – @ZTourettes

“Normalcy is simply the majority sect of magical thinking.” – @vgr

“The plan, a memory of the future, tries on reality to see if it fits.” – Laurence Gonzalez

–

Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. Between these two banks the river of my life flows. – Nisargadatta Maharaj [eddies]

–

today my anthro professor said something kindof really beautiful:

“you all have a little bit of ‘I want to save the world’ in you, that’s why you’re here, in college. I want you to know that it’s okay if you only save one person, and it’s okay if that person is you”  – tahtahtahlia

–

“It means we are the ghosts in someone else’s universe.” – Dave Trott

–

“Did you forget you live here?” – Arden

–

Keep your bustling cities,

give me only the moon,

some wine, and old friends

laughing in the desert,

and I will show you

what the

pagans

called god.

– Love Her Wild, by Atticus

–

If you are willing to look at another person’s behaviour towards you as a reflection of the state of their relationship with themselves rather than a statement about your value as a person, then you will, over a period of time, cease to react at all – Yogi Bhajan

_

“If I consider my life honestly, I see that it is governed by a certain very small number of patterns of events which I take part in over and over again.

Being in bed, having a shower, having breakfast in the kitchen, sitting in my study writing, walking in the garden, cooking and eating our common lunch at my office with my friends, going to the movies, taking my family to eat at a restaurant, going to bed again. There are a few more.

There are surprisingly few of these patterns of events in any one person’s way of life, perhaps no more than a dozen. Look at your own life and you will find the same. It is shocking at first, to see that there are so few patterns of events open to me.

Not that I want more of them. But when I see how very few of them there are, I begin to understand what huge effect these few patterns have on my life, on my capacity to live. If these few patterns are good for me, I can live well. If they are bad for me, I can’t. — Christopher Alexander

–

“You’ve got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists.” – GK Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday [source]

“Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it – that is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.” – Stephen Fry

• On Unconditional Love and Sincerity:
  • “What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.” – Vincent Van Gogh
• On Teaching:
  • ‘When you teach anything, especially math? Students often ask, “How did anybody come up with this?” It tells us that as teachers we have stripped away all the humanity, all the actual natural progression that led up to the idea. It is so important to realize how an idea came into being… Stories are easier to remember than random facts.” – Ed Burger, 5 Elements of Effective Thinking
• On Differences of Opinion:
  • If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. If some one maintains that two and two are five, or that Iceland is on the equator, you feel pity rather than anger, unless you know so little of arithmetic or geography that his opinion shakes your own contrary conviction. The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion. So whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants. – Bertrand Russell, “An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish,” 1943
• On Mistakes:
  • Seneca: “Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century:
    • -Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others;
    • -Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected;
    • -Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it;
    • -Refusing to set aside trivial preferences;
    • -Neglecting development and refinement of the mind;
    • -Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.”
• On Changing The World:
  • “The first step — especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money — the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.” – Chuck Palahniuk
• On Motivation:
  • “How bad do you want to be successful? If you don’t want it as badly as you want to breathe, you won’t be successful. Sleep is for those who are broke. I don’t sleep. Most of you don’t want it bad, you just kinda want it. You will never be successful until I don’t have to give you a dime to do what you want to do. I don’t need that money. I got it in here.”
  • “The level of achievement that we have at anything is a reflection of how well we were able to focus on it. The only thing holding you back is the way you’re thinking. Pick a time that’s yours- shut everything off, sit and focus on your goal. When you get discouraged, go to the big picture. There’s no work involved, it’s all a joy. Because you know you’re reaching your goal.” – Steve Vai
  • “You gotta be hungry! You have talents and skills within you that you haven’t even begin to reach for yet. Toxic relationships drain you.”  – Les Brown
  • “It ain’t about how hard you can hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward. If you know what you’re worth go out and get what you’re worth! But you gotta be willing to take the hits! And not say you ain’t where you are because of him, or her, or anybody! Cowards do that and that ain’t you! You’re better than that!” – Rocky 4
• Patriotism
  • “Patriotism is proud of a country’s virtues and eager to correct its deficiencies; it also acknowledges the legitimate patriotism of other countries, with their own specific virtues. The pride of nationalism, however, trumpets its country’s virtues and denies its deficiencies, while it is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries. It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, “the greatest,” but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is.” — Sydney J. Harris
• Reading, for kids
  • “My daughter is seven, and some of the other second-grade parents complain that their children don’t read for pleasure. When I visit their homes, the children’s rooms are crammed with expensive books, but the parent’s rooms are empty. Those children do not see their parents reading, as I did every day of my childhood. By contrast, when I walk into an apartment with books on the shelves, books on the bedside tables, books on the floor, and books on the toilet tank, then I know what I would see if I opened the door that says ‘PRIVATE–GROWNUPS KEEP OUT’: a child sprawled on the bed, reading.”
  • ― Anne Fadiman, Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
  • “Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, ”Lighthouses” as the poet said ”erected in the sea of time’.’ They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
• On wanting others to stay the same
  • “I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind. No matter how many times we reopen “King Lear,” never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert’s father’s timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known at all our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just produced the greatest book of poetry his age has seen.” — Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
• “Friends and good manners will carry you where money won’t”
• On Precision:
  • “We can’t define anything precisely. What do you mean by what do you mean?” – Richard Feynman
• On Loneliness:
  • “The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
  • “She gazed back over the sea, at the island. But the leaf was losing its sharpness. It was very small; it was very distant. The sea was more important now than the shore. Waves were all round them, tossing and sinking, with a log wallowing down one wave; a gull riding on another. About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she murmured, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.” – To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
  • “If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.” — Richard Yates
  • “We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and — in spite of True Romance magazines — we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely — at least, not all the time — but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.” — Hunter S. Thompson
• On Pessimism / cynicism
  • “No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.” – Helen Keller
  • “All I ask of you is one thing: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism- it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.” – Conan O’ Brien
• On Hate and pain:
  • “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” – James Baldwin
  • “The concept of portraying evil and then destroying it – I know this is considered mainstream, but I think it is rotten. This idea that whenever something evil happens someone particular can be blamed and punished for it, in life and in politics, is hopeless.” — Hayao Miyazaki
  • “I wanted to kill the me underneath. That fact haunted my days and nights. When you realize you hate yourself so much, when you realize that you cannot stand who you are, and this deep spite has been the motivation behind your behavior for many years, your brain can’t quite deal with it. It will try very hard to avoid that realization; it will try, in a last-ditch effort to keep your remaining parts alive, to remake the rest of you. This is, I believe, different from the suicidal wish of those who are in so much pain that death feels like relief, different from the suicide I would later attempt, trying to escape that pain. This is a wish to murder yourself; the connotation of kill is too mild. This is a belief that you deserve slow torture, violent death.” — Wasted by Marya Hornbacher
  • “Rowling established that Voldemort hated non-pure-blood wizards despite being a half-blood himself, fleshing him out as a self-hating bully: “Well I think it is often the case that the biggest bullies take what they know to be their own defects, as they see it, and they put them right on someone else and then they try and destroy the other and that’s what Voldemort does.” — JK Rowling
  • “Slut-bashing is a cheap and easy way to feel powerful. If you feel insecure or ashamed about your own sexual desires, all you have to do is call a girl a “slut” and suddenly you’re the one who is “good” and on top of the social pecking order.” — Leora Tanenbaum, Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation
• On Compassion:
  • “The healing of our present woundedness may lie in recognizing and reclaiming the capacity we have to heal each other, the enormous power in the simplest of human relationships: the strength of a touch, the blessing of forgiveness, the grace of someone else taking you just as you are and finding in you an unsuspected goodness. Everyone alive has suffered. It is the wisdom gained from our wounds and from our own experiences of suffering that makes us able to heal. Becoming expert has turned out to be less important than remembering and trusting the wholeness in myself and everyone else. Expertise cures, but wounded people can best be healed by other wounded people. Only other wounded people can understand what is needed, for the healing of suffering is compassion, not expertise.” – Rachel Naomi Remen
• On Unconditional Love And Sincerity:
  • “What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.” – Vincent Van Gogh
• On life (consider Elizabeth Gilbert’s TEDtalk on creativity)
  • “There’s the little empty pain of leaving something behind—graduating, taking the next step forward, walking out of something familiar and safe into the unknown. There’s the big, whirling pain of life upending all of your plans and expectations. There’s the sharp little pains of failure, and the more obscure aches of successes that didn’t give you what you thought they would. There are the vicious, stabbing pains of hopes being torn up. The sweet little pains of finding others, giving them your love, and taking joy in their life as they grow and learn. There’s the steady pain of empathy that you shrug off so you can stand beside a wounded friend and help them bear their burdens.
  • And if you’re very, very lucky, there are a very few blazing hot little pains you feel when you realize that you are standing in a moment of utter perfection, an instant of triumph, or happiness, or mirth which at the same time cannot possibly last—and yet will remain with you for life.” – Jim Butcher, on Life
• On Thinking
  • “Most people do not bother any more about their thinking than they do about walking or breathing. Thinking seems a natural enough process and one is happy with one’s competence. There is, however, much more individuality in thinking styles and sufficient difference between individuals to suggest that thinking may be a skill about which something can be done. The earlier that children can be taught to think the greater advantage they will have to understand and assimilate other subjects.”
  • “There is a growing feeling amongst educators that thinking is a skill that should be given direct attention. It is felt that thinking is a skill that can be improved by focused attention and the practice of some basic skills. The old idea that skill in thinking is developed as the by-product of such subjects as Geography and History is no longer tenable. Some thinking skills concerned with the sorting of information can be taught as a by-product of such subjects but these are only part of the broad range of thinking skills required for life. For example, the thinking skills required for action must include consideration of priorities, objectives, other people’s views and the like. Descriptive thinking is not enough.” -Edward de Bono
• On Politics (not voting)
  • “If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don’t bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don’t bullshit yourself that you’re not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.” ― David Foster Wallace, Up, Simba!
• On Death
  • “Psychological death is worse than physical death.” — An Egyptian protester, on why he risked his life
• On Art As Utility
  • “There are certain emotions in your body that not even your best friend can sympathize with, but you will find the right film or the right book, and it will understand you.”— Björk
  • “Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.” – Edgar Allan Poe
  • “We need a renaissance of wonder. We need to renew, in our hearts and in our souls, the deathless dream, the eternal poetry, the perennial sense that life is miracle and magic.” — E. Merrill Root
  • “I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of generalization of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with characters’ pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might be just that simple.” — David Foster Wallace
• Interesting = Happiness:
  • “The happiest people are those who think the most interesting thoughts. Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good company, good conversation, are the happiest people in the world. And they are not only happy in themselves, they are the cause of happiness in others.” – William Lyon Phelps
• The night was a garden of eyes
  • “I shrugged my shoulders, muttered “back soon,” and plunged into the darkness. At first I couldn’t see anything. I fumbled along the cobblestone street. I lit a cigarette. Suddenly the moon appeared from behind a black cloud, lighting a white wall that was crumbled in places. I stopped, blinded by such whiteness. Wind whistled slightly. I breathed the air of the tamarinds. The night hummed, full of leaves and insects. Crickets bivouacked in the tall grass. I raised my head: up there the stars too had set up camp. I thought that the universe was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket’s saw, the star’s blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken? I threw my cigarette down on the sidewalk. Falling, it drew a shining curve, shooting out brief sparks like a tiny comet.
  • I walked a long time, slowly. I felt free, secure between the lips that were at that moment speaking me with such happiness. The night was a garden of eyes. — Octavio Paz, The Blue Bouquet
• The Lucky Ones
  • “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”- Richard Dawkins
• I want a woman who…
  • “I want a woman who can sit me down, shut me up, tell me ten things I don’t already know, and make me laugh. I don’t care what you look like, just turn me on. And if you can do that, I will follow you on bloody stumps through the snow. I will nibble your mukluks with my own teeth. I will do your windows. I will care about your feelings. Just have something in there.” — Henry Rollins
• Life’s Challenges
  • “When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not ready. The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back. A week is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destiny.” — Paulo Coelho
• Ideas and Fantasies:
  • “The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies, that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die, but things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on forever.” — Chuck Palahniuk
• Democracy, Economic Fascism:
  • “Personally I’m in favor of democracy, which means that the central institutions in the society have to be under popular control. Now, under capitalism we can’t have democracy by definition. Capitalism is a system in which the central institutions of society are in principle under autocratic control. Thus, a corporation or an industry is, if we were to think of it in political terms, fascist; that is, it has tight control at the top and strict obedience has to be established at every level — there’s a little bargaining, a little give and take, but the line of authority is perfectly straightforward. Just as I’m opposed to political fascism, I’m opposed to economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it’s pointless to talk about democracy.” — Noam Chomsky
• On Travel:
  • “Travel is little beds and cramped bathrooms. It’s old television sets and slow internet connections. Travel is extraordinary conversations with ordinary people. It’s waiters, gas station attendants, and housekeepers magically becoming the most interesting people in the world. It’s churches that are compelling enough to enter. It’s McDonald’s being a luxury.
  • It’s the realization that you may have been born in the wrong country. Travel is a smile that leads to a conversation in broken English. It’s the epiphany that pretty girls smile the same way all over the world. Travel is tipping 10% and being embraced for it. Travel is the same white t-shirt again tomorrow. Travel is accented sex after cheap wine and too many unfiltered cigarettes. Travel is flowing in the back of a bus with giggly strangers. It’s nostalgia for studying abroad that one semester. It’s a street full of bearded backpackers looking down at maps.
  • Travel is wishing for one more bite of whatever that just was. It’s the rediscovery of walking somewhere. It’s sharing a bottle of liquor on an overnight train with a new friend. Travel is: “Maybe I don’t have to do it that way when I get back home.” Travel is realizing that “age 30” should be shed of its goddamn stigma. Travel is fucking invigorating.”
  • — Nick Miller
• On Singer-Songwriters:
  • “I really have so much trouble with singer-songwriters in general. I think the genre is full of hacks. I think it’s a complete glut of whining introspection that’s really manipulative. It’s like that feeling in a film where the strings swell too loud. It’s emotional hyperbole. And I’ve always secretly hated myself for being one. I feel as though I’ve gone to great lengths in my life trying to distance myself from the fact that, at heart, I am a singer-songwriter.” — Emily Haines to Filter Magazine
• Unlearn fear:
  • “Love is what we are born with. Fear is what we learn. The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and prejudices and the acceptance of love back in our hearts. Love is the essential reality and our purpose on earth. To be consciously aware of it, to experience love in ourselves and others, is the meaning of life. Meaning does not lie in things. Meaning lies in us.” – Marianne Williamson
  • “The purpose of life is not to be happy – but to matter, to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you have lived at all.” — Leo Rosten
• Meaning of words
  • “Let us not forget that a word hasn’t got a meaning given to it, as it were, by a power independent of us, so that there could be a kind of scientific investigation in what the word really means. A word has the meaning someone has given to it.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
• Forgiveness
  • “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” — Mahatma Gandhi
• Not Fitting In
  • “It makes me happy when I see teenage girls who clearly don’t fit in. gives me hope the future might still have personality.” — Hayley Williams
• “Someday”
  • “Conditions are never perfect. ‘Someday’ is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. If it’s important to you and you want to do it ‘eventually’, just do it and correct the course along the way.” — Tim Ferriss, The Timing is Never Right
• Murderous Relatives
  • “The most loving parents and relatives commit murder with smiles on their faces. They force us to destroy the person we really are: a subtle kind of murder.” — Jim Morrison
• Desperate love
  • “In desperate love, it’s always like this, isn’t it? In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding that they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place.” —Elizabeth Gilbert
  • “I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity, and her flaming self respect. And it’s these things I’d believe in, even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Wanting too much
  • “It is not a good thing to want a thing too much. It sometimes drives the luck away. You must want it just enough, and you must be very tactful with God or the gods.”— John Steinbeck (The Pearl)
• Creativity, Steve Jobs
  • “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” — Steve Jobs
• Feeling As A Historical Fragment
  • My life often seemed to me like a story that has no beginning and no end. I had the feeling that I was a historical fragment, an excerpt for which the preceding and succeeding text was missing. I could well imagine that I might have lived in former centuries and there encountered questions I was not yet able to answer; that I had been born again because I had not fulfilled the task given to me. —Carl Jung
• Principles
  • “A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower
• Failure
  • “Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.” — Henry Ford
• Who are you when you perform?
  • “…there was one actor I was working with who kept asking me, “Who are you when you perform? Who is your audience?” And I kept saying, “I don’t know, I don’t know.” Then I realized—I had never put this into words before because it seemed too stupid—I’m talking to a sadder version of myself, sitting in the middle of the theater. I’m trying to cheer her up, or say something inspiring or funny or sad. That sounds narcissistic, but I don’t know who other people are, and I don’t like it when they assume they know who I am. It’s a very tricky thing when you’re giving somebody something; how open are you to them and how open are they to you?”— Laurie Anderson
• Destroy Balance
  • Motion is created by the destruction of balance. – Leonardo Da Vinci
• Subtlety in sex
  • “I’ve never been very keen on women who hang their sex round their neck like baubles. I think it should be discovered. It’s more interesting to discover the sex in a woman than it is to have it thrown at you.” — Alfred Hitchcock
• The Past
  • “The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it.” — Wendell Berry
• Raw Strength
  • “I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong but to feel strong. To measure yourself at least once. To find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions. Facing the blind death stone alone, with nothing to help you but your hands and your own head.” — Christopher McCandless, Into The Wild
• Breakups and loss
  • “Because you can never go from going out to being friends, just like that. It’s a lie. It’s just something that people say they’ll do to take the permanence out of a breakup. And someone always takes it to mean more than it does, and then is hurt even more when, inevitably, said ‘friendly’ relationship is still a major step down from the previous relationship, and it’s like breaking up all over again. But messier.” —This Lullaby by Sarah Dessen
  • “We were friends and have become estranged. But this was right, and we do not want to conceal and obscure it from ourselves as if we had reason to feel ashamed. We are two ships each of which has its goal and course…and then the good ships rested so quietly in one harbor and one sunshine that it may have looked as if they had reached their goal and as if they had one goal. But then the almighty force of our tasks drove us apart again into different seas and sunny zones, and perhaps we shall never see one another again… Let us then believe in our star friendship even if we should be compelled to be earth enemies.” — Friedrich Nietzche
• Mindfulness
  • “The soul always knows what to do to heal itself. The challenge is to silence the mind.”~Caroline Myss
  • “It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.” — Franz Kafka
  • Live your daily life in a way that you never lose yourself. When you are carried away with your worries, fears, cravings, anger, and desire, you run away from yourself and you lose yourself. The practice is always to go back to oneself. —Thich Nhat Hanh
  • “Happiness lies not in finding what is missing, but in finding what is present.” — Tara Brach
  • “We are perceivers. The world that we perceive, though, is an illusion. It was created by a description that was told to us since the moment we were born.” — Don Juan, Tales of Power
  • “A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity, when for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.” — A Single Man
  • “Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “Silence is Golden; it has divine power and immense energy. Try to pay more attention to the silence than to the sounds. Paying attention to outer silence creates inner silence: the mind becomes still. Every sound is born out of silence, dies back into silence, and during its life span is surrounded by silence. Silence enables the sound to be. It is an intrinsic but unmanifested part of every sound, every musical note, every song, and every word. The unmanifested is present in this world as silence. All you have to do is pay attention to it.” -Eckhart Toille
• Happiness:
  • “The happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes.”— Hugh Downs
  • “A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.”
• Giftedness and frustration
  • “Because gifted children are able to consider the possibilities of how things might be, they tend to be idealists. However, they are simultaneously able to see that the world is falling short of how it might be. Because they are intense, gifted children feel keenly the disappointment and frustration which occurs when ideals are not reached. Similarly, these youngsters quickly spot the inconsistencies, arbitrariness and absurdities in society and in the behaviors of those around them. Traditions are questioned or challenged. For example, why do we put such tight sex-role or age-role restrictions on people? Why do people engage in hypocritical behaviors in which they say one thing and then do another? Why do people say things they really do not mean at all? Why are so many people so unthinking and uncaring in their dealings with others? How much difference in the world can one person’s life make?”
• On responsibility and adulthood:
  • “The best day of your life is the one on which you decide your life is your own. No apologies or excuses. No one to lean on, rely on, or blame. The gift is yours – it is an amazing journey – and you alone are responsible for the quality of it. This is the day your life really begins.” — Bob Moawad
• People who’ve been defeated
  • “The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These people have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.” — Elizabeth Kubler Ross
• Everyone is broken
  • “I basically assume that every single group, or religious community, has a problem, is in some way screwed up. I don’t believe that there is one single, perfect spiritual way.” — The Edge
• Choosing your thoughts
  • “There is so much about my fate that I cannot control, but other things do fall under the jurisdiction. I can decide how I spend my time, whom I interact with, whom I share my body and life and money and energy with. I can select what I can read and eat and study. I can choose how I’m going to regard unfortunate circumstances in my life-whether I will see them as curses or opportunities. I can choose my words and the tone of voice in which I speak to others. And most of all, I can choose my thoughts.” — Elizabeth Gilbert
• Discovering your uility functions
  • “We all have different desires and needs, but if we don’t discover what we want from ourselves and what we stand for, we will live passively and unfulfilled. ”— Bill Watterson
  • “What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain knowledge must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. … I certainly do not deny that I still recognize an imperative of knowledge and that through it one can work upon men, but it must be taken up into my life, and that is what I now recognize as the most important thing.” — Søren Kierkegaard
• lovers who were through with games
  • “Spending time with her seemed almost too easy, as if we’d skipped all those first steps that couples are supposed to have, as if we had loved each other as kids, gone our separate ways, then returned to each other as adults who were through with games and already knew each other’s secrets.” — Adam Langer (The Thieves of Manhattan)
• computers
  • “A computer terminal is not some clunky old television with a typewriter in front of it. It is an interface where the mind and body can connect with the universe and move bits of it about.” – Douglas Adams
• Metaphors
  • “An idea is a feat of association, and the height of it is a good metaphor”- Robert Frost
  • “Since finding out what something is, is largely a matter of discovering what it is like, the most impressive contribution to the growth of intelligibility has been made by the application of suggestive metaphors” – Jonathan Miller quotes (English Actor, Producer and Film Director medical doctor, and man of letters. b.1934)
  • “The metaphor is perhaps one of man’s most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him.” – Jose Ortega y Gasset quotes (Spanish philosopher and humanist , 1883-1955)
  • “Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.” – Orson Scott Card
• Heroes
  • “A hero is someone who rebels or seems to rebel against the facts of existence and seems to conquer them. Obviously that can only work at moments. It can’t be a lasting thing. That’s not saying that people shouldn’t keep trying to rebel against the facts of existence. Someday, who knows, we might conquer death, disease and war.” – Jim Morrison
  • “In this world no one rules by love; if you are but amiable, you are no hero; to be powerful, you must be strong, and to have dominion you must have a genius for organizing.” – John Henry Newman
  • “Nurture your minds with great thoughts, to believe in the heroic makes heroes.”- Benjamin Disraeli
• Oscar Wilde
  • In many ways, The Importance of Being Earnest was an artistic breakthrough for Wilde, something between self-parody and a deceptively flippant commentary on the dramatic genre in which Wilde had already had so much success.
  • Wilde’s genre of choice was the Victorian melodrama, or “sentimental comedy,” derived from the French variety of “well-made play” popularized by Scribe and Sardou. In such plays, fallen women and abandoned children of uncertain parentage figure prominently, letters cross and recross the stage, and dark secrets from the past rise to threaten the happiness of seemingly respectable, well-meaning characters.
  • In Wilde’s hands, the form of Victorian melodrama became something else entirely. Wilde introduced a new character to the genre, the figure of the “dandy” (a man who pays excessive attention to his appearance).
  • This figure added a moral texture the form had never before possessed. The character of the dandy was heavily autobiographical and often a stand-in for Wilde himself, a witty, overdressed, self-styled philosopher who speaks in epigrams and paradoxes, ridicules the cant and hypocrisy of society’s moral arbiters, and self-deprecatingly presents himself as trivial, shallow, and ineffectual. In fact, the dandy in these plays always proves to be deeply moral and essential to the happy resolution of the plot.