Continuous Creation

The human body is not a thing or substance, given, but a continuous creation. The human body is an energy system which is never a complete structure; never static; is in perpetual inner self-construction and self-destruction; we destroy in order to make it new.
--Norman O. Brown

Truly Were Ever

More and more as I am here and see what life really is, I understand that it is not when or how you die but how and if you truly were ever alive.
--Dr. Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald

Live For

Horses live to run; that's what they do. What do we live to do, the way horses live to run?... This is the part of us that makes our brief, improbable little lives worth living: the ability to reach through our own isolation and find strength, and comfort, and warmth for and in each other. This is what human beings do. This is what we live for, the way horses live to run.
--Martha Beck

Experiment

New York City has always been an experiment in hope.
--Michele Madigan Somerville

Technology

But the people who yearn for the good old days of older technology like typewriters don't seem to realize there never were any good old days. At the same time, in looking at new technology, it never does everything that people promise it will.
--Dennis Baron

Came To Myself

In the middle of the journey of our life
I came to myself within a dark wood
where the straight way was lost.
--Dante Alighieri

Alternatives

For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox.
--James Salter

Look Back

In stories, those who look back--Lot's wife, Orpheus and Eurydice--are lost. Looking to the side instead, to gauge how our companions are faring, is a way of glancing at a safer reflection of what we cannot directly bear, like Perseus seeing the Gorgon safely mirrored in his shield.
--Tim Kreider

Happiness

It's not so easy to be leaders of the modern world with the right to the pursuit of happiness written into the constitution.
--Robert Wilson

Business Model

"You're gonna miss us when we're gone" has never been much of a business model.
--Clay Shirky

Substance

Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance.
--Sam Brown

Community

Where is the idea of community, the idea that we sacrifice and help others? Those who oppose government conveniently forget that the community, "we the people," wrote the Constitution to "promote the general welfare."
--Ira Rosofsky

The Word

Contrary to popular belief, it's not the legs that go first, it's remembering the word for legs.
--Larry Gelbart

Grief

The world does not distinguish one grief from another. It is the temptation to believe otherwise that keeps us in chains.
--Joy Williams

Paranoid

We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.
--Richard Hofstadter

Share

We have to get through, and if we're really lucky, we can find somebody to get through with. To share the map.
--Ron McLarty

Alone

What's behind the civilized exteriors is a tangle of neediness, hostility and resentment, propelled by a longing to be utterly alone and a longing to never, ever be alone.
--Ben Brantley

Superior

Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital.
--Abraham Lincoln

Cheese

When it comes to cheese, there's goat people, there's sheep people and there's cow people. None of them see eye to eye, and all are biased. The stereotype is sheep people like landscape; they like to see the flock on the hillside, which looks pretty, but a sheep person doesn't really like the animal itself. Goat people like the animal and make the cheese to support the animal. And cow people like heavy machinery.
--Brad Kessler

Campfire

It can be hard to remember that the present is the only campfire in the icy wastes of time.
--Verlyn Klinkenborg

Manifest

That which you manifest is before you.
--Garth Stein