Danticat

"Misery won't touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you, sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of."


December 6, 1999

Danticat

For some, passion is the gift of a ring in a church ceremony, the bearing of children as shared property. For me it was just a smile I couldn't help, tugging at the sides of my face."


December 6, 1999

Stephenson

"Southern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot."


October 30, 1999

Tan

Two years is enough time, I know, to layer memories of what was with what might have been. And that's fine, because I now believe truth lies not in logic but in hope, both past and future. I believe hope can surprise you. It can survive the odds against it, all sorts of contradictions, and certainly any skeptics rationale of relying on proof through fact."


October 18, 1999

Tan

"You can't stop young girls from wishing. No! Everyone must dream. We dream to give ourselves hope. To stop dreaming-- well, that's like saying you can never change your fate."


October 18, 1999

Tan

"Yet over these last seventeen years, I've come to know that the heart has a will of its own, no matter what you wish, no matter how often you pull out the roots of your worst fears."


October 18, 1999

Robbins

"Life is largely material, and there is no small heroism in the full and open enjoyment of material things. The accumulation of material things is shallow and vain, but to have a genuine relationship with such things is to have a relationship with life and, by extension, a relationship with the divine."


August 30, 1999

Robbins

"Reality is subjective, and there's an unenlightened tendency in this culture to regard something as "important" only if it's sober and severe. Sure and still you're right about your cheerful dumb, only they're not so much happy as lobotomized. But your Gloomy Smart are just as ridiculous. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, people who truly like themselves, they don't think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start payin' attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form o' self indulgence."


August 30, 1999

Robbins

"Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the twinkle of the morning star is the one who nurtures it and rides it, in grace and love and wit, from peculiar station to peculiar station along life's bittersweet route."


August 29, 1999

Robbins

"The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplacable being.
The difference between love and logic is that in the eyes of a lover, a toad can be a prince, whereas in the analysis of a logistician, the lover would have to prove that the toad was a prince, an enterprise destined to dull the shine of many a passion."


Augist 29, 1999