Embarrassed

The trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist.
--John Steinbeck

Sweet Warmth

I believe that everyone in the world wants to be with someone else tonight, together in the dark, with the sweet warmth of a hip or a foot or a bare expanse of shoulder within reach.
--Roger Angell

Center

Only the fool will try to define himself only with words. Music is at the center of everyone's soul.
--Dr. Harvey "Gizmo" Rosenberg

Change

What, then, is the true Gospel of consistency? Change. Who is the really consistent man? The man who changes. Since change is the law of his being, he cannot be consistent if he stick in a rut.
--Mark Twain

Not Desolate

As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate.
--E.B. White

Slowness

Slowness is an act of resistance, not because slowness is a good in itself but because of all that it makes room for, the things that don't get measured and can't be bought.
--Rebecca Solnit

Shadows

Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.
--Junichiro Tanizaki

Bear Fruit

Whenever I look around me, I wonder what old things are about to bear fruit, what seemingly solid institutions might soon rupture, and what seeds we might now be planting whose harvest will come at some unpredictable moment in the future.
--Rebecca Solnit

Phantom

Since what we know of the future is made up of purely abstract and logical elements--inferences, guesses, deductions--it cannot be eaten, felt, smelled, seen, heard, or otherwise enjoyed. To pursue it is to pursue a constantly retreating phantom, and the faster you chase it, the faster it runs ahead. This is why all the affairs of civilization are rushed, why hardly anyone enjoys what he has, and is forever seeking more and more. Happiness, then, will consist, not of solid and substantial realities, but of such abstract and superficial things as promises, hopes, and assurances.
--Alan W. Watts

Nobody

It's really wonderful to be able to be nobody, and then have a moment when I can be somebody, and then go right back to being nobody again. It's like stepping into the phone booth and changing into my costume.
--Natalie Merchant

Unanticipated

I don't know what's coming. I do know that, whatever it is, some of it will be terrible, but some of it will be miraculous, that term we reserve for the utterly unanticipated, the seeds we didn't know the soil held.
--Rebecca Solnit

Buried

We are in a media culture where we are buried in information but we know nothing. Because of that superficiality, we expect heroes to be perfect, but they're not. They are a strange combination of strengths and weaknesses.
--Ken Burns

Time

People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.
--Seneca

Error

Honour thy error as a hidden intention.
--Brian Eno

Find

The world is full of souls who struggle to find the younger person they once were within the body of the older person they have become.
--Jennifer Finney Boylan

Cargo Cult

People worship the Internet like a cargo cult. It's this thing that they have that brings them free stuff, and they think it's magic. It's beyond rational thought and reason...and they have no sense that behind all that free stuff are the drowned ships and sailors.
--David Lowery

Truths

There are also two kinds of truths: truths of reasoning and truths of fact. Truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; those of fact are contingent and their opposite is possible.
--Gottfried Leibniz

Machine

Each machine has its own, unique personality which probably could be defined as the intuitive sum total of everything you know and feel about it.
--Robert M. Pirsig

Emergency

I conceive that I may in an emergency do things on military grounds which cannot be done constitutionally by Congress.
--Abraham Lincoln

Missing Here

As all wisdom does, seeing starts with simple questions: What could I know, should I know, that I don't know? Just what am I missing here?
--Margaret Heffernan

Our Days

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
--Annie Dillard