Quotes
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171
“The lack of alternatives to an illegal action does not legitimize that action.” – Zadie Smith Continue reading
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170
“Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories. – Zadie Smith Continue reading
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169
“The only public good is that which assures the private good of the citizens.” – Simone de Beauvoir Continue reading
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168
“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.” – Euripides Continue reading
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167
“With freedom of the press, nations are not sure of going toward justice and peace. But without it, they are sure of not going there.” – Albert Camus Continue reading
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166
“I postpone death by living, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing.” – Anais Nin Continue reading
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164
“What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.” – Thomas Carlyle Continue reading
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163
“To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be trusted.” – George MacDonald Continue reading
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162
“The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction not a destination.” -Carl Rogers Continue reading
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159
“Experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant.” -Edgar Allan Poe, “The Mystery of Marie Roget” Continue reading
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158
“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 8:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the Continue reading
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157
“If you’re lonely when your alone, you’re in bad company.” – Jean-Paul Sartre Continue reading
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156
“Happiness consists in realizing it is all a great strange dream.” – Jack Kerouac Continue reading
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153
“Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.” -Ludwig van Beethoven Continue reading
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152
“Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you can possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. Continue reading
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148
“I think there are enormous obstacles to deep reading now. I think that the tyranny of the visual is a frightening thing.” –Harold Bloom Continue reading
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147
“And all at once, summer collapsed into fall.” -Oscar Wilde Continue reading
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146
“Having experienced both, I am not sure which is worse: intense feeling, or the absence of it.” -Margaret Atwood Continue reading
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145
“The problem isn’t a lack of money, food, water or land. The problem is that you’ve given control of these things to a group of greedy psychopaths who care more about maintaining their own power than helping mankind.” -Bill Hicks Continue reading
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142
“The willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life is the source from which self-respect springs.” –Joan Didion Continue reading
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140
“As for me, I know nothing else but miracles, Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan, Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky, Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water, Or stand under the trees in the woods, Or talk by day Continue reading
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138
August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time. -Sylvia Plath Continue reading
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135
“Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.” ~ Paul Valery Continue reading
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127
“Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people’s anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me Continue reading
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126
“Reading fiction not only develops our imagination and creativity, it gives us the skills to be alone. It gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we’ve never met, living lives we couldn’t possibly experience for ourselves, because the book puts us inside the character’s skin.” ~ Ann Patchett Continue reading
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125
“People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” ~ Logan Pearsall Smith Continue reading
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123
“Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it.” ~ Russell Baker Continue reading
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121
“We create ying and yang, yes and no, plus and minus.” ~ Frederick Lenz Continue reading
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111
“Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize your already in heaven now.” -Jack Kerouac Continue reading
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108
“Book readers are special people, and they will always turn to books as the ultimate pleasure. Those who do not read are the unfortunate ones. There’s nothing wrong with them; but they are missing out on one of life’s compensations and rewards. A great book is a friend that never lets you down. You can Continue reading
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107
“When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.” ~ John Berger Continue reading
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Quote / Yogi Berra
It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future. Yogi Berra Continue reading
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Tuesday Morning Quote
“A man is born alone and dies alone; and he experiences the good and bad consequences of his karma alone; and he goes alone to hell or the Supreme abode.” ~ Chanakya Continue reading
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Storm Clouds
“January cold and desolate; February dripping wet; March wind ranges; April changes; Birds sing in tune To flowers of May, And sunny June Brings longest day; In scorched July The storm-clouds fly, Lightning-torn; August bears corn, September fruit; In rough October Earth must disrobe her; Stars fall and shoot In keen November; And night is Continue reading
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Summer Reading
“I was lucky enough not to face any required summer reading lists until I went to college. So I still think of summer as the best time to read for fun.” ~ Margaret Haddix Continue reading
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Friday’s Quote
“Coffee is real good when you drink it gives you time to think. It’s a lot more than just a drink; it’s something happening. Not as in hip, but like an event, a place to be, but not like a location, but like somewhere within yourself. It gives you time, but not actual hours or Continue reading
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Tonight Show
“This is The Tonight Show. I can’t tell you too much about it, other than the fact that this program is going to go on forever.” ~ Steve Allen He said this back in the 1950s, and it still is an NBC staple… Continue reading
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July
“Hot July brings cooling showers, Apricots and gillyflowers.” ~ Sara Coleridge Continue reading
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Friday’s Quote
“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” ~ Maya Angelou Continue reading
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Saturday Evening Quote
“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” ~ Jane Austen Continue reading
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Sunday Evening Quote
“If the watchdog doesn’t bark, how do you know there’s a burglar in the basement? And the press is supposed to be a watchdog.” ~ Bill Moyers Continue reading
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Wednesday Evening Quote
“Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but “steal” some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. Continue reading
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Monday’s Quote
“When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps.” ~ John Lennon Continue reading
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Climate-Change Deniers
“The climate-change deniers are rapidly ending up with as much intellectual credibility as creationists and Flat Earthers. They are nudging close to having the moral credibility of Holocaust deniers.” ~ Johann Hari Continue reading
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Saturday Morning Quote
“I want my stories to be something about life that causes people to say, not, oh, isn’t that the truth, but to feel some kind of reward from the writing, and that doesn’t mean that it has to be a happy ending or anything, but just that everything the story tells moves the reader in Continue reading
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Friday’s Quote
“The most thought-provoking thing in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking.” ~ Martin Heidegger Continue reading
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Today’s Quote
“Finish each 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; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.” ~ Ralph Waldo Continue reading
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Today’s Quote
“To err is to wander, and wandering is the way we discover the world; and, lost in thought, it is also the way we discover ourselves. Being right might be gratifying, but in the end it is static, a mere statement. Being wrong is hard and humbling, and sometimes even dangerous, but in the end Continue reading
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Today’s Quote
“Short stories demand a certain awareness of one’s own intentions, a certain narrowing of the focus.” ~ Joan Didion Continue reading
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Reading or Writing
“If you spend enough time reading or writing, you find a voice, but you also find certain tastes. You find certain writers who when they write, it makes your own brain voice like a tuning fork, and you just resonate with them. And when that happens, reading those writers … becomes a source of unbelievable Continue reading
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Today’s Quote
“Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotchpotch of impulses, our perpetual miracle – for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death; let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out Continue reading
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Nabokov and Joyce
“What did Nabokov and Joyce have in common, apart from the poor teeth and the great prose? Exile, and decades of near pauperism. A compulsive tendency to overtip. An uxoriousness that their wives deservedly inspired. More than that, they both lived their lives ‘beautifully’–not in any Jamesian sense (where, besides, ferocious solvency would have been Continue reading
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Today’s Quote
“I’ve gotten a lot of comfort from the philosophy of the Roman Stoics. For me, one of the most powerful ideas of Stoicism is that you can’t pick or choose in the world what you want to happen and what you don’t want to happen, and that actually if you did get to choose, the Continue reading
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Iain Banks Quote
“People can be teachers and idiots; they can be philosophers and idiots; they can be politicians and idiots… in fact I think they have to be… a genius can be an idiot. The world is largely run for and by idiots; it is no great handicap in life and in certain areas is actually a Continue reading
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People Quote
“People? People are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. They pass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought experiment. At the campfire they put the usual fraction on exhibit, and listen to their own silent gibber about how they’re feeling and how they’re going down. We’ve been there. Death helps. Death gives Continue reading
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Today’s Quote
“Good novels are produced by people who voluntarily isolate themselves and go deep, and report from the depths on what they find.” ~ Jonathan Franzen Continue reading
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Nina Simone Quote
“Birds flying high you know how I feel Sun in the sky you know how I feel Breeze driftin’ on by you know how I feel And this old world is a new world And a bold world For me And I’m feeling good I’m feeling good” ~ Nina Simone Continue reading
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Writing Quote
“As every writer knows… there is something mysterious about the writer’s ability, on any given day, to write. When the juices are flowing, or the writer is ‘hot’, an invisible wall seems to fall away, and the writer moves easily and surely from one kind of reality to another… Every writer has experienced at least Continue reading
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Literature
“To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That’s what lasts. That’s what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.” ~ Susan Sontag Continue reading
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Fear
“F-E-A-R has two meanings: ‘Forget Everything And Run’ or ‘Face Everything And Rise.’ The choice is yours.” ~ Zig Ziglar Continue reading
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Today’s Quote
“Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.” ~ Agatha Christie Continue reading
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Daydreamer
“The trouble with being a daydreamer who doesn’t say much is that the teachers at school, especially those who don’t know you very well, are likely to think you’re rather stupid. Or, if not stupid, then dull. No one can see the amazing things that are going on in your head.” ~ Ian Mcewan Continue reading
A Pondering Mind 
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