Hawaii

You can't really understand Barack until you understand Hawaii.
--Michelle Obama

Pick Battles

Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.
--Jonathan Kozol

Unique Gift

That is the unique gift that humans have above all animals: they can share their death with each other.
--William Barrett

Doubts

God have mercy on the man who doubts what he's sure of.
--Bruce Springsteen

Holding

There is no greater agony than holding an untold story inside of you.
--Maya Angelou

New Media

This is the beauty of new media: It isn't so transitory as newspapers and TV. Good stuff sticks around and people e-mail it to friends and slowly it floods the country.
--Garrison Keillor

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

Incapable

Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.
--Blaise Pascal

Creative

The longer we fight the creative destruction of the marketplace by resuscitating dying companies, the slower our ability to shift capital to truly creative sectors in the economy will be.
--Eliot Spitzer

Real

Everything you can imagine is real.
--Pablo Picasso

Repair

The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.
--John F. Kennedy

Attachments

From the moment we're born we face a troubling paradox: Life is made interesting, fun, and happy by the attachments we form, but the loss of these same attachments lies as the root cause of our worst pain in life.
--Alex Lickerman

Meet Girls

As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life--so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
--M. Cartmill

Mostly

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
--Michael Pollan

Mistakes

Reason often makes mistakes, but conscience never does.
--Josh Billings

Revenge

Progress is so often revenge on the past.
--Verlyn Klinkenborg

Passing Time

As far as I can tell, this is how to live--to value the passing time.
--Roger Rosenblatt

Contraption

A baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.
--Michael Chabon

Serious Division

I don't see any more serious division in our country than we had in the Civil War and at other times.
--Richard J. Daley

Time Wastes

I will not argue the matter. Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity life follows my pen. The days and hours of it are flying over our heads like clouds of a windy day never to return--more every thing presses on--and every time I kiss thy hand to bid adieu, every absence which follows it, are preludes to the eternal separation which we are shortly to make!
--Laurence Sterne

Fragmentation

The thing about fragmentation is, it satisfies only part of the audience experience. Yes, it is exactly what you want, but it can be lonely.
--Nancy Nall

Community

If I can afford to do a little bit more so that a whole bunch of families out there have a little more security, when I already have security, that's part of being a community.
--Barack Obama

Vampires

If conservatives get to call universal health care "socialized medicine," I get to call private health care "soulless vampires making money off human pain."
--Bill Maher

Wit

There's a helluva distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.
--Dorothy Parker

Forecasting

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
--John Kenneth Galbraith

Like Storms

Thoughts are themselves like storms. They go from pleasant to dark just like that, and no mastery of the science of Brownian motion is going to enable us to predict their course and dominate them.
--Justin E. H. Smith

What The Hell

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"
--David Foster Wallace

Put Off

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
--Pablo Picasso

Our Job

Our job is not to protect the private health insurance industry.
--Sen. Bernie Sanders

By Art

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.
--Elizabeth Bowen

Goddess

There are two goddesses in your heart. The Goddess of Wisdom and the Goddess of Wealth. Everyone thinks they need to get wealth first, and wisdom will come. So they concern themselves with chasing money. But they have it backwards. You have to give your heart to the Goddess of Wisdom, give her all your love and attention, and the Goddess of Wealth will become jealous, and follow you.
--Joe Vigil

Smarter

People who write competently, never mind stylishly, are indicating by their example that they respect writing. People who respect writing are more likely to read. And readers are smarter, there I said it.
--Nancy Nall

Intimacy

That's what real intimacy is about. Sharing secrets with one another--about what's on one's mind inside and out.
--Julie Gottman

Both

It is no more meaningful to say that Stalin and George Orwell were both socialists than to observe that Martin Luther King Jr. and George Wallace were both Christians.
--Andrew O'Hehir

Bubble

The real estate bubble was also a crime scene. The only trouble is delineating where crime ended and social policy began.
--Tom Vanderbilt

Secret Identity

Honest question, from someone less conversant in the superhero genre than you might think: Do superheroes need to hide their secret identities even from...each other? I mean, did Superman and Batman hang around the Justice League and Batman would say, "You know what really bugs me? The liberal media! Like, have you read that Clark Kent guy? He's so obviously biased!" and then Superman would say "Well, what about that jerk Bruce Wayne? Inherited all that money and is he doing anything worthwhile with it? He's probably putting most of it into overseas tax dodges!" That all just seems awkward.
--Joshua Fruhlinger

Captivated

If people were as captivated by public affairs as they are by erotic ones, the economy would be very strong.
--Magdalena

Details

Attend to the details. Teach your children manners. Write cogent paragraphs. Drive carefully. And make a good potato salad, one with some crunch, maybe accompanied by a fried drumstick with crackly skin--the humble potato and the stupid chicken, ennobled by diligent cooking--and is this not the meaning of our beautiful country, to take what is common and enable it to become beautiful?
--Garrison Keillor

Never To Arrive

I remember how, in the corporate world, I always knew there was some higher position I could attain, which meant that, like Zeno's arrow, I was guaranteed never to arrive and always to remain dissatisfied.
--Pico Iyer

Changes

The world changes in direct proportion to the number of people willing to be honest about their lives.
--Armistead Maupin

Closer To The Sun

The sun can only be seen by the light
 of the sun. The more a man or woman knows,
 the greater the bewilderment, the closer 
to the sun the more dazzled, until a point
 is reached where one no longer is.
--Farid ud-Din Attar

Surprised

When I was born I was so surprised I didn't talk for a year and a half.
--Gracie Allen

Then You Read

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
--James Baldwin

Not Logical

If private insurers say that the marketplace provides the best quality healthcare, if they tell us that they're offering a good deal, then why is it that the government--which they say can't run anything--suddenly is going to drive them out of business? That's not logical.
--Barack Obama

Leader

If in the darkness of ignorance,
you don't recognize a person's true nature,
look to see whom he has chosen for his leader.
--Rumi

Pursued

It seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn't pursued.
--Pico Iyer

Regret

Do I regret this life? Is it, despite all our brave words, a cheat and a waste? Does it make any slight difference to the universe that we are present?
--Garrison Keillor

Ham (and Eggs)

If we had ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had eggs.
--Anonymous

Influential

You don't have to be a "person of influence" to be influential. In fact, the most influential people in my life are probably not even aware of the things they've taught me.
--Scott Adams

Agriculture

All agriculture is at its heart a business of capturing free solar energy in a food product that can then be turned into high-value human energy.
--Allan Nation

Emotions

Let's not forget that the little emotions are the great captains of our lives and we obey them without realizing it.
--Vincent Van Gogh

Rich

I call that man rich who can satisfy the requirements of his imagination.
--Henry James

Bugs

If you are not a Buddhist, you think there are Buddhists and non-Buddhists, but if you are a Buddhist, you realize everyone's a Buddhist--even the bugs.
--Shunryu Suzuki

Decisions

Every decision we make in life has both a price and payoff.
--Bill Roberts

Free

Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

Stumbling

Keep on going and the chances are you will stumble on something, perhaps when you are least expecting it. I have never heard of anyone stumbling on something sitting down.
--Charles F. Kettering

Wonderful

I don't want to make money, I just want to be wonderful.
--Marilyn Monroe

Wag

Everything matters more than we think it does, and, at the same time, nothing matters so much as we think it does. The merest spark may set all Europe in a blaze, but though all Europe be set in a blaze twenty times over, the world will wag itself right again.
--Samuel Butler

Something Nice

To say something nice about yourself, this is the hardest thing in the world for people to do. They'd rather take their clothes off.
--Nancy Friday

Sociable

The sociable solitary is an easily pained but far from unusual breed; one distinguishing characteristic is that farewells are forever on the brink of being made.
--Anthony Lane

Avoid

Don't worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older, it will avoid you.
--Winston Churchill

Pretend

I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me.
--Cary Grant

Right

Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct.
--Viktor E. Frankl

Rare

What would humans be without love? "Rare," said Death.
--Terry Pratchett

Thanks

I'm still an atheist, thank God.
--Luis Bunuel

Approximately

It is better to be approximately correct, than precisely wrong.
--Sam Kash Kachigan

Instincts

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey "people." People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war...Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.
--C. S. Lewis

Gradual

Gradual disintegration, not sudden catastrophic collapse, is the way civilizations end.
--John Michael Greer

Initiations

Marriage is not unadulterated happiness, but is rather another of life's initiations.
--Thomas Moore

Can't Steer

The will is never free--it is always attached to an object, a purpose. It is simply the engine in the car--it can't steer.
--Joyce Cary

Variation of Wave

It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.
--Albert Einstein

Movement

Learning is movement from moment to moment.
--J. Krishnamurti

Perfect Sense

To spend time with these Indiana community bankers is to step into an alternate universe, where everything sounds a little strange because it makes perfect sense. You hear things like, "If you don't understand the risk you're taking, don't take it." And, "We want to be around for decades, so we're not focused on the next quarter."
--David Segal

Serious and Studious

I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood--sex and the dead.
--William Butler Yeats

Dust

Beauty is everlasting and dust is for a time.
--Marianne Moore

J.S. Bach

Any species capable of producing, at this earliest, juvenile stage of its development, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, cannot be all bad.
--Dr. Lewis Thomas

Deep Impulses

It is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbors, or even our relations.
--Bertrand Russell

What Is It Really?

This universe of ours, what is it really? Here we are, centers of consciousness, surrounded by a buzzing confusion which we must try to understand. But we are of the selfsame stuff of the universe--perhaps ultimately a cloud of energy interacting with other clouds of energy--and on that account we are in the role more of participants than observers. We cannot distance ourselves from our ambient, hold it at arm's length for impartial scrutiny. This fact has been heavily underlined by modern physics since it sets limits to our knowledge. What we experience is not external reality per se but our interaction with it, so that in a very real sense we are constructing our universe from ourselves.
--Dennis Elwell

Seize It, Let Go Of It

Sartaj was thinking about how uncanny an animal this life was, that you had to seize it and let go of it at the same time, that you had to enjoy but also plan, live every minute and die every moment.
--Vikram Chandra

Planted the Tree

When eating a fruit, think of the person who planted the tree.
--Vietnamese proverb