Quotable - inability or unwillingness?

"...living longer doesn’t mean that your ability to engage in physical labor — which many Americans still do — has been correspondingly extended.
This whole discussion bears witness to the remarkable inability or unwillingness of our elite to understand what life is like for those less fortunate."

- Paul Krugman

Quotable - amazing grace

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Of all my books, Amazing Grace means the most to me. It took the most out of me and was the hardest to write, because it was the hardest to live through these experiences. I felt it would initially be seen as discouraging but, ultimately, sensitive readers would see the resilient and transcendent qualities ... that it would be seen as a book about the elegant theology of children. ~ Jonathan Kozol (his birthday today)

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Mr. Kozol signed a copy of Amazing Grace for me and, strangely, he added a smiley face to his signature.

Quotable - at least every day

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One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words. ~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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Quotable - omnivorous reading

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I read omnivorously, I always have, my entire life. I would rather be dead than not read. So, there's always time for that. I read while I eat, and our whole family did. We all had very bad manners at the table. All of our books are stained with spaghetti sauce, and that sort of thing. ~ Annie Proulx

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Quotable - memorable mistakes

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Eventually, I figured out how my life works. But it’s because of all those mistakes that I have the career I have now as a memoirist. No one wants to read a book about someone who got it all right the first time! ~ Trish Ryan, interview with Gretchen Rubin

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Quotable - beware happiness killers

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There are three happiness killers - doing work you do not love and are not passionate about, surrounding yourself with people who you do not really like (someone who just fills time), and living somewhere that does not let you be you. Just stop it. Life is far too short. ~ Robert Florida, interview with Gretchen Rubin

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Quotable

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I'm slightly irritated by what I think is a kind of modern demand for characters you can root for, characters you would like to be friends with. Speaking as a reader, I have to say that some of my favorite characters in literature are some of the nasty ones. ~ Zoe Heller, NPR interview

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Quotable

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Always be a little kinder than necessary. ~ J M Barrie, born 150 years ago today

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Quotable - slow circles of nature

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Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace. ~ May Sarton, born today

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Quotable - Just do it

"Julia Cameron put it something like this: The only screenplay that definitely won't get made into a movie -- is the one that is never written at all. We are all capable of much more than we give ourselves credit for, and what we can find along the way is that the effort itself -- regardless of the outcome -- can bring great happiness."

~ Amy Wilson, interview with Gretchen Rubin

Quotable - literary irritation

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I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both. ~ Flannery O'Connor, born today

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Quotable - good can come from spacing out

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There are few things that I love more than looking out the window of a car, train, or bus. One day, when I was gazing out of a bus window, I was struck by a thought: “What do I want out of life?” “Well,” I thought, “I want to be happy.” It occurred to me that I never thought about whether I was happy or not, or how I could be happier, or even what it meant to be happy. “Zoikes,” I thought, “I should have a happiness project!” If I’d been checking my emails, I might never have had the idea for the happiness project. ~ Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project

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Quotable - the butterfly of the moment

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It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? ~ Vita Sackville-West

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Quotable

“I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind. But I've bought a big bat. I'm all ready you see. Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!”

~ Dr. Seuss (birthday today)

Quotable - what it feels like

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...I’m just trying to understand, trying to articulate, what it feels like to be damaged goods in our oversexualized culture. We founder in a mere surface culture of smirk, snark and innuendo. The greedy objectification of the body — in both women and men — accelerates, speeding so fast that the objections can’t even be heard over the roar of the mass media. We are told to worship washboard abs and Everest biceps, improbably perky breasts and buns of titanium. It sometimes seems that every image spewed forth by the electronic media resonates with just one unsubtle subtext: sex. ~ Dana Jennings, After Surviving Cancer, a Focus on True Manhood

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Quotable - barbarian invasions

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European men went about their business in grown-up clothing while American men dressed like five-year-olds and got flames tattooed on their necks as though contemplating a barbarian invasion of Akron, Ohio. ~ James Kunstler, Euroland, the Horror Movie

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Quotable - life is a gift

"I am here not to achieve or even to change the world, but simply to live. Life is a gift, and I’m happy to accept every moment of it."

~ Leo Babauta, zen habits

Quotable - Be cool

"Coolness to the pizza delivery dude is a practice in equality. My measurement as a human being, my worth, is the pride I take in performing my job -- any job -- and the respect with which I treat others. I am the equal of the world not because of the car I drive, the size of the TV I own, the weight I can bench press, or the calculus equations I can solve. I am the equal to all I meet because of the kindness in my heart. And it all starts here -- with the pizza delivery dude."

~ Sarah Adams, from "Be Cool to the Pizza Dude" in This I Believe.

Quotable - the season for dreaming

"Winter seems the season for dreaming. We are stuck inside, victims of the weather, and our minds take us worlds away.... I don't grouse about the weather. I think it an opportunity. I get the chance to dream, to plan and to hope."

~ Kat @ Keep the Coffee Coming

Quotable - I think you'll like this

"It can happen anywhere: a dinner table, a pub, a bus queue, a classroom, a bookshop. You have struck up a conversation with someone you don’t know, and you’re getting on OK, and then suddenly, without warning, you hear the five words that mean the relationship has no future beyond the time it takes to say them: “I think you’ll like it.” This phrase is presumptuous enough when used to refer to, say, a crisp flavour; if, however, you happen to be talking about books or films or music, then it is completely unforgivable, a social solecism on a par with bottom-pinching. You think I’ll like it, do you? Well, it has taken me over fifty years to get anywhere near an understanding of what I think I might like, and even then I get it wrong half the time, so what chance have you got? Every now and again I meet someone who is able to make shrewd and thoughtful recommendations within the first five years of our acquaintance, but for the most part, the people I listen to I’ve known for a couple of decades, a good chunk of which has been spent talking about the things we love and hate."

~ Nick Hornby from "My Waterstone's Writer's Table"