Portrait

In life, a man commits himself and draws his own portrait, outside of which there is nothing.
--Jean-Paul Satre

Heart

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
--Steve Jobs

Quietly Thinking

Like many people, I like to set aside a few hours every day, generally between 3 and 6 a.m., to lie quietly thinking about everything that could go horribly wrong with my life and all the ways in which I am negligent and reprehensible. I have spasms of panic over things I shouldn't have written, or, worse, things I should have; I regret having spent all the money and wonder where more money might ever conceivably come from; I wish I'd kissed girls I didn't, as long ago as 1985.
--Tim Kreider

Words

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.
--Philip K. Dick

Music

Remember, information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the best.
--Frank Zappa

Spirit-Matter

There is neither spirit nor matter in the world; the stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could produce the human molecule.
--Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Prickling

With all soulful work, I have found that the line between knowing and not knowing looks sharp and crisp only from a distance. Up close, there is a blurring that occurs as we near that line, a knowing that is not yet a knowing but more a prickling in the soul.
--Suzanne Clothier

Fiction

Time does not heal all wounds, closure is a fiction, and so too is the notion that God never asks of us more than we can bear. Enduring the unbearable is sometimes exactly what life asks of us.
--Ted Gup

False Notion

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
--Isaac Asimov

Wrong City

What a Bostonian means when he or she says "They messed with the wrong city" is "You don't think this changes anything, do you?"
--Dennis Lehane

Cry

Someday I will no longer call out, and there will be no heartbeat. I will be dead. What happens then? From my point of view, nothing. Absolutely nothing. All the same, as I wrote to Monica Eng, whom I have known since she was six, "You'd better cry at my memorial service."
--Roger Ebert

Anew

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
--Abraham Lincoln

Everything

Everything in life is just for a while.
--Philip K. Dick

Words

A multitude of words is probably the most formidable means of blurring and obscuring thought.
--Eric Hoffer

Children

Children have never been good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.
--James Baldwin

Privatize

Let's privatize her funeral. Put it out to competitive tender and accept the cheapest bid. It's what she would have wanted.
--Ken Loach

Advertising

Advertising counterbalances the tendency of people to adhere to familiar habits.
--Jaron Lanier

Faith

Many readers have informed me that it is a tragic and dreary business to go into death without faith. I don't feel that way. "Faith" is neutral. All depends on what is believed in.
--Roger Ebert

The Difference

I guess that's the story of life: what you most fear never happens, but what you most yearn for never happens either. This is the difference between life and fiction. I suppose it's a good trade-off. But I'm not sure.
--Philip K. Dick

Ethical Infants

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.
--General Omar N. Bradley

Personal

When people say, "It's business, it's not personal," that just means it's not personal for them. It can be personal for me.
--R.A. Dickey

Privacy

Privacy is delayed gratification.
--Alessandro Acquisti