Change is inevitable. Adaptation is optional. -- Anonymous When Zen teacher Barbara Rhodes was just beginning her practice with Master Seung Sahn during the hippie era, she had a reputation for being fond of things that were old: clothing, jewelry, and other items. One day her teacher came to her and said: "I have a present for you. It's something that's really, really old." Seung Sahn dropped the gift into her outstretched palm. It was a stone. --Sean Murphy Norma loves our new king-sized mattress. To me, it's as if we're sleeping in different zip codes. --Sy Safransky In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that these were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers...There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. --Thomal Merton And what vision or insight can I share from my solo sojourn into the darkness? It is a small thought, perhaps not relevant beyond the borders of my own life: All hope lies in one's openess to experience and ability to change. --Alvah Simon

I'd like to plant a little garden with you now,
take care of a piece of the earth somehow,
we'll tend it when we're old and grey,
try to straighten up and say,
hey baby, hey baby, hey baby, hey.
--G. Brown

We live to hear the slack-jawed gasping, We live under a halo of held-breath. And when the children raise up a giant chill of laughter, It's like the bending of death, And we can make something bigger than any one of us alone. Then the clowns will take off their makeup and the people will go home. --Ani Diffranco As soon as you're born, you start dying, So you might as well have a good time. --Cake It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing. --Hemingway

The key to climbing well is to climb as much as you can.
--Lynn Hill

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared with what lies within us.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson as quoted by Lynn Hill

It's always good to talk. By talking to people, you humanize yourself; you take away some of their ability to demonize you. --Darryl Cherney The combination of controlling every position of my body and of forcing my mind to shut out the ever-present urge to submit to the very real fear of falling created an interesting result: a feeling that I was simultaneously acutely aware of both everything and nothing. --Lynn Hill One side of my hair was plastered to my head, the other sticking out in a series of peaks and horns. It is as if the hairs on my head have a life of their own, behaving perfectly sensibly all day, then waiting till I drop off to sleep and starting to run and jump about childishly, saying, "Now what shall we do?" --Helen Fielding When someone leaves you...the worst is the thought that they tried you out and, in the end, the whole sum of parts adds up to you got stamped REJECT by the one you love. How can you not be left with the personal confidence of a passed-over British Rail sandwich? --Helen Fielding She paused for a drag on her cigarette. "Life's a shit sandwich, my ass. Life's a polka and don't you forget it!" she said. --Wally Lamb

I write: Love is like breathing. You take it in and let it out.
--Wally Lamb

To emerge from isolation can be disorienting. Everything looks bright, new, vivid. After I had been herding sheep for only three days, the sound of the camp tender's pickup flustered me. Longing for human company, I felt a foolish grin take over my face; yet I had to resist an urgent temptation to run and hide. --Gretel Ehrlich I get in these hoarding moods and get mad at myself for all of the stupid things I do. Then I pick up this old kaleidoscope and give it a whirl. See, it's impossible to keep just one thing in view. It gives way to other things and they're all beautiful. --Gretel Ehrlich Purple is more interesting than Litchfield. --Sarah Bruesewitz

As James Randi says, believers in the paranormal are like 'unsinkable rubber ducks.'
--Michael Shermer

If I were a stick, I would be a stick in Vermont.
--Dov

A good rodeo, like a good marriage, or a musical instrument when played to the pitch of perfection, becomes more than what it started out to be. It is effort transformed into effortlessness; a balance becomes grace, the way love goes deep into friendship. --Gretel Ehrlich If you work in the kitchen and have the mind of a rocket scientist, you're going to organize your cupboards like Mission Control. Nobody will know their way around it as well as you do. It needs to be that way. --Barbera Kingsolver, on the role of a 50's era housewife I believed in trees, and that heaven had something to do with how dead trees gentle themselves into long, mossy columns of bright-smelling, crumbling earth, lively inside with sprouting seeds and black beetles. I could not make myself believe in a loud-voiced, bearded God on his throne in the clouds, but I was moved to tears by the compost pile. --Barbera Kingsolver ...but the loss of empathy is also the loss of humanity, and that's no small trade-off. --Barbera Kingsolver The real wild kingdom is a small and brown as a wren, as tedious as a squirrel turning back the scales of a pine cone to capture its seeds, as quiet as a milkweed seed on the wind-the long, slow stillness between takes. --Barbera Kingsolver The process of love is messy, holy, ordinary, and wildly hopefull. --Sark

I eat cake for breakfast. I know I'm going to want it all day anyway, so I just start with it.
--Michelle

A finely tempered nature longs to escape from his noisy cramped surroundings into the silence of the high mountains where the eye ranges freely through the still pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity. --A. Einstein as quoted by R. M. Pirsig I've wondered why it took us so long to catch on. We say it and yet we didn't see it. Or rather we were trained not to see it. Conned perhaps into thinking that the real action was metropolitan and all this was just boring hinterland. It was a puzzling thing. --Robert M. Pirsig My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making quality decisions and that's all. --Robert M. Pirsig Well the mountain was so beautiful that this guy built a mall and a pizza shack. He built an ugly city because he wanted the mountain to love him back. --Dar Williams There were a couple of occasions in India when I was twenty that felt to me like going out with a thimble in your hand, hoping to catch a drop of rain, and having the ocean land on your head. These experiences convinced me that there is an absolute love that pervades everything. --David James Duncan

I love this big lug of a country and the crazy people in it.
--Michael Moore

It seems to unfair that, even in the face of death, we must sit and struggle to squeeze all of our accumulated sadness and puzzlement through the narrow funnel of words, making do with the same tired language we have used everywhere for everything... --Linda Moore Spencer When a good song came on, I would get up and dance in the livingroom. --K.E. Ellingson The sound of someone's voice, and even their pauses, contains the full weight of human experience. --Ira Glass You don't forget those rare moments when someone takes pleasure in your being pleased. --John Rosenthal

Nature is not anthropomorphic.
--Lao Tsu

Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't get eight cats to pull a sled through the snow.
--Jeff Valdez

We learn from experience, that men never learn anything from experience. --George Bernard Shaw Character is what we do when no one is watching. --Anonymous Sometimes I'd get mad because things didn't work out so well, I'd spoil a flapjack, or slip in the snowfield while getting water, or one time my shovel went sailing down into the gorge, and I'd be so mad I'd want to bite the mountaintops and would come in the shack and kick the cupboard and hurt my toe. But let the mind beware, though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious. --Jack Kerouack

Maybe I'm NOT repulsive!
--Jana Van Alstine

Inside our minds we are such miracles, but the more we try to explain our individuality, the more ordinary we seem. --Colin Chisholm Every American carries in his bloodstream the heritage of the malcontent and the dreamer. --Dorothy Fuldheim I don't have the technological answers for how it can be done, but neither did President John F. Kennedy when he announced a national goal to land a man on the moon by the end of the 1960's. The point is that, to eliminate pollution, we first have to make it our goal...if we don't make it our goal, then we will never devote the resources, never develop the technology, and never solve the problem. --Robert Hinkley They would not be smart enough to pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the sole. --Garrison Keillor The point is not to be talented. The point is to have fun! -Michelle Shocked The kindest word in the world is the unkind word, unsaid. -Source unknown

I've walked this earth and watched people. I can be sincere and say I like them.
-Bjork

It was Sam's first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace... --J.R.R. Tolkien I have never seen a man in civil life as nervous as Robert Cohn-nor as eager. I was enjoying it. It was lousy to enjoy it, but I felt lousy. --Hemingway Well, I'm lucky cuz I am my East Berlin. I have this wall and what I knew of the free world was that I could see their fireworks and I could hear their radio. And I thought that every minute, I would only start confessing. And they would know that I was scared, they would know that I was guessing. But the wall came down and the others stood before me, with their stumbling and their mumbling and their calling out just like me. --Dar Williams

Grown-ups have great power. They can order candy on credit over the telephone and have it delivered. Wow.
--George Carlin