1
Claim whatever you want. Say you only want a happy family or a successful career or a big house. I say: no, that's not what you want. You'll settle for those things, but you really want a monkey that does your evil bidding. Pullman is a genius just for this.Maureen Johnson
2
L'utilité du vivre n'est pas en l'espace: elle est en l'usage.Michel De Montaigne
3
Heureuse la mort qui oste le loisir aux apprests de tel equipage.Michel De Montaigne
4
D'autant que nous avons cher, estre, et estre consiste en mouvement et action.Michel De Montaigne
5
L'honneste est stable et permanent.Michel De Montaigne
6
J'accuse toute violence en l'education d'une ame tendre, qu'on dresse pour l'honneur, et la liberté.Michel De Montaigne
7
Je hay entre autres vices, cruellement la cruauté, et par nature et par jugement, comme l'extreme de tous les vices.Michel De Montaigne
8
Il n'est rien qui tente mes larmes que les larmes.Michel De Montaigne
9
Les naturels sanguinaires à l'endroit des bestes, tesmoignent une propension naturelle à la cruauté.Michel De Montaigne
10
Nature a, (ce crains-je) elle mesme attaché à l'homme quelque instinct à l'inhumanitéMichel De Montaigne
11
Even ivory towers need central heating.Breyten Breytenbach
12
Never say more than is necessary.Richard Brinsley Sheridan
13
Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.Annie Dillard
14
And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.Virginia Woolf
15
Every healthy person at some period must feed on fiction as well as fact; because fact is a thing which the world gives to him, whereas fiction is a thing which he gives to the world.G.k. Chesterton
16
Of course, women are capable of all sorts of major unpleasantness, and there are violent crimes by women, but the so-called war of the sexes is extraordinarily lopsided when it comes to actual violence. Unlike the last (male) head of the International Monetary Fund, the current (female) head is not going to assault an employee at a luxury hotel; top-ranking female officers in the US military, unlike their male counterparts, are not accused of any sexual assaults; and young female athletes, unlike those male football players in Steubenville, aren't likely to urinate on unconscious boys, let alone violate them and boast about it in YouTube videos and Twitter feeds. No female bus riders in India have ganged up to sexually assault a man so badly he dies of his injuries, nor are marauding packs of women terrorizing men in Cairo's Tahrir Square, and there's no maternal equivalent to the 11 percent of rapes that are by fathers or stepfathers.Rebecca Solnit
17
It's rare that anyone says what this medical study does, even if in the driest way possible "Being male has been identified as a risk factor for violent criminal behavior in several studies, as have exposure to tobacco smoke before birth, having antisocial parents, and belonging to a poor family". It's not that I want to pick on men. I just think that if we noticed that women are, on the whole, radically less violent, we might be able to theorize where violence come from and what we can do about it a lot more productively. Clearly the ready availability of guns is a huge problem for United States, but despite this availability to everyone, murder is still a crime committed by men 90 percent of the time. .Rebecca Solnit
18
I've learned that a certain amount of self-doubt is a good tool for correcting, understanding, listening, and progressing - though too much is paralyzing and total self-confidence produces arrogant idiots. There's a happy medium between these poles to which the genders have been pushed, a warm equatorial belt of give and take where we should all meet.Rebecca Solnit
19
That made clear to me the continuum that stretches from minor social minor to violent silencing and violent death (and I think we would understand misogyny and violence against women even better if we looked at the abuse of power as a whole rather than treating domestic violence separately from rape and murder and harrassment and intimidation, online at home and in the workplace and in the streets; seen together, the pattern is clear). Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty.Rebecca Solnit
20
[The Yellow Wallpaper] was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked.Charlotte Perkins Gilman
21
The principal advantage of narrative writing is that it assists us place our life experiences in a storytelling template. The act of strict examination forces us to select and organize our past. Narration provides an explanatory framework. Human beings often claim to understand events when they manage to formulate a coherent story or narrative explaining what factors caused a specific incident to occur. Stories assist the human mind to remember and make decisions based on informative stories. Narrative writing also prompts periods of intense reflection that leads to more writing that is ruminative. Contemplative actions call for us to track the conscious mind at work rendering an accounting of our weaknesses and our strengths, folly and wisdom. .Kilroy J. Oldster
22
....And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of timeGeorge Orwell
23
The world, full of past sound, would be like the sky, full of past light. The world would be like the mind, for which there is no once.Amy Leach
24
The whole of eternity is present now. We apprehend eternity through our senses and mental imagination. We can never recapture lost time. Memory allows us to taste the scintillating experience of living by recollecting our past in a series of sequential personal events and an orderly arrangement of a linked series of cultural happenings. Writing our personal story calls for us to remember the sensation of what it entails to live tactilely before losing lucidity of the mind.Kilroy J. Oldster
25
It's like rock n' roll for your eyes.Paul Howard
26
Know then thyself; presume not God to scan, The proper study of mankind is Man.Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side, And too much weakness for the Stoic's pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest; In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast;In doubt his mind or body to prefer; Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err. Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks too little or too much.Alexander Pope
27
Personal essay writing is analogous to undertaking a vision quest, a potential turning point in life taken to discover intimate personal truths, form complex abstract thoughts, and ascertain the intended spiritual direction of a person’s life.Kilroy J. Oldster
28
Perhaps talk of counters turned the boy’s thoughts to his father’s glove shop. His father would have accounted for all his transactions using the tokens. They were hard and round and very thin, made of copper or brass. There were counters for one pair of gloves, and for two pairs, and three and four and five. But there was no counter for zero. No counters existed for all the sales that his father did not close.Daniel Tammet
29
On less lucid evenings, every library is a haunted cemetery.S.D. Chrostowska
30
What if, when Tracy Austin writes that after her 1989 car crash, 'I quickly accepted that there was nothing I could do about it, ' the statement is not only true but exhaustively descriptive of the entire acceptance process she went through?David Foster Wallace
31
The point of the essay is to change things.Edward Tufte