Ondaatje

"Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. What we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross."
Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero
January 28, 2012

Bailey

"There is a certain depth of illness that is piercing in its isolation; the only rule of existence is uncertainty, and the only movement is the passage of time. One cannot bear to live through another loss of function, and sometimes friends and family cannot bear to watch. An unspoken, unbridgeable divide may widen. Even if you are still who you were, you cannot actually fully be who you are. Sometimes the people you know well withdraw, and then even the person you know as yourself begins to change."
Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating
September 26, 2011

Coehlo

"Love was above everything else, and there was no hatred in love, only the occasional mistake."
Paulo Coelho, Brida: A Novel
September 8, 2011

Coelho

"...finding one important thing in your life doesn't mean you have to give up all the other important things."
Paulo Coehlo, Brida: A Novel
September 8, 2011

Coelho

"Get rid of the clothes that were not intended for you,... And wear all the others. It's important to keep the soil turned, the waves crashing, and all your emotions in movement. The whole Universe is moving all the time, and we must do likewise."
Paulo Coehlo, Brida: A Novel
September 7, 2011

Coelho

"An anonymous text from the Tradition says that, in life, each person can take one of two attitudes: to build or to plant. The builders might take years over their tasks, but one day, they finish what they're doing. Then they find they're hemmed in by their own walls. Life loses its meaning when the building stops.

Then there are those who plant. They endure storms and all the many vicissitudes of the seasons, and they rarely rest. But, unlike a building, a garden never stops growing. And while it requires the gardener's constant attention, it also allows life for the gardener to be a great adventure.

Gardeners always recognize one another, because they know that in the history of each plant lies the growth of the whole World."

Paul Coehlo, Brida: A Novel
September 4, 2011

Keneally

"History is everything. People will not in the end forgive you for not having shared theirs."
Thomas Keneally, Woman of the Inner Sea
September 27, 2010

Roth

"The light and the heat of the day (that blessing), the unchanging quiet of each cow's life as it paralleled that of all the others, the enamored old man studying the suppleness of the efficient, energetic woman, the adulation rising in him, his looking as though nothing more stirring had ever before happened to him, and, too, my own willing waiting, my own fascination with their extensive disparity as human types, with the nonuniformity, the variability, the teeming irregularity of sexual arrangements-- and with the injunction upon us, human and bovine, the highly differentiated and the all but undifferentiated, to live, not merely to endure but to live, to go on taking, giving, feeding, milking, acknowledging wholeheartedly, as the enigma that it is, the pointless meaningfulness of living-- all was recorded as real by tens of thousands of minute impressions. The sensory fullness, the copiousness, the abundant--superabundant--detail of life, which is the rhapsody."-- Phillip Roth, The Human Stain
June 1, 2010

Naylor

"Yeah, the Flying Dutchman would definitely have been good enough to join one of those teams; they grow 'em tough up there in Mansfield, Pennsylvania. He could have made it with no rest--in body or mind--and still brought in a batting average of .327 while transforming himself into a golden shield between second and third bases. He'd been just like Pop Lloyd in that respect. And it leaves me confused, why these newspapermen look back and Pop's career and call him the black Honus Wagner; all things being equal--or in this case unequal--the highest compliment to pay the Flying Dutchman is to call him the white Pop Lloyd. And I'll even bring Ty Cobb into that club, although he'd play dirty and spike a man in a second: he's the White Oscar Charleston if there's ever been one. Those other players, now, those others just couldn't have made it. And no, I haven't forgotten the Babe. Too temperamental. He couldn't have gone two seasons in Josh Gibson's shoes and held to his record, and so far as I am concerned, the title of a White Josh Gibson still goes unclaimed."
Gloria Naylor, Bailey's Cafe
April 7, 2009

Debbie

"I love the gay community. For those that don't you are missing out on a lot of love."
Debbie
August 11, 2008

Olbermann

"There's a false concept of balance that Rupert Murdoch and Fox News have successfully pushed: Everybody has to be left or right; every argument has to be countered. That's "fair and balanced." It's really the moral relativism they always complain about, applied to journalism. If you say a falling coffee cup will shatter on the floor, that must be "balanced" by someone saying no, it will fly upward into the hand of God. Nonsense! But if you put this nonsense on television, it gains credibility. You can say TV is crap, but the most authenticating thing in the world is "I saw it on TV.""
Keith Olbermann
Playboy Magazine, October 2007

Bennett

"The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you'd thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out, and taken yours."


April 3, 2008

Pratchett

"Chess in particular had always annoyed him. It was the dumb way the pawns went off and slaughtered their fellow pawns while the kings lounged about doing nothing that always got to him; if only the pawns united, maybe talked the rooks around, the whole board could've been a republic in a dozen moves."



March 13, 2008

Pratchett

"Do not...what do they call it...go postal? Treat this as a learning exercise. Find out why the world is not as you thought it was. Assemble the facts, digest the information, consider the implications. Then go postal. But with precision."


March 13, 2008

Pratchett

"He knew in his heart that spinning upside down around a pole wearing a costume you could floss with definitely was not Art, and being painted lying on a bed wearing nothing but a smile and a small bunch of grapes was good solid Art, but putting your finger on why this was the case was a bit tricky."



March 13, 2008

Wilson

"Truths only seem good since they can seem useful for our own success, which we value as good. Truth is only what we ought to believe if we want to succeed. To a pragmatist, truth is what we ought to assume. I do not necessarily endorse the Cartesian sense of uncertainty, but certainly we, as responsible philosophers, must ask more of ourselves than usefulness to necessitate truth."
Charles Wilson
Paper for my Introduction to Philosophy class, 2/25/2008
March 4, 2008

Pratchett

"As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up."


March 2, 2008

Hardy

"I am now about to pass into my normal condition. For people are almost always in their graves. When we survey the long race of men, it is strange and still more strange to find that they are mainly dead men, who have scarcely ever been otherwise."


January 29, 2008

Pham

"Two people in love is their worlds becoming one, each person's heart is the other's pillow."
Bao Tram Pham, philosophy paper for my introduction to philosophy class
December 9, 2007

Pasternak

"That's metaphysics, my dear fellow. It's forbidden by my doctors, my stomach won't take it."


September 26, 2007