Saturday, June 26, 2010

Unknown

Every problem has its price, but if you worry about it you pay double.

Unknown

Worry is the darkroom in which negatives are developed.

Thursday, June 24, 2010

HLL

I'm better at my job than they let me be.

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Juliet Clutton-Brock

By their offerings of food, affection, and comfort humans persuade cats to share the same core area of their home range.

-as quoted in Merle's Door, by Ted Kerasote

Ted Kerasote

Like hot weather and cities, cats simply had to be respected and endured.

-From Merle's Door

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Diana Spechler

Although I was five years his junior, I was this man’s teacher. Also, I had a boyfriend. And although my boyfriend was loyal, loving and tall, our relationship reminded me of childhood, when adults would let me win every game, even though I wished they wouldn’t.

--"Modern Love," New York Times, June 13, 2010

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Nicholas Carr

The deeper a technology is woven into the patterns of everyday life, the less choice we have about whether and how we use that technology.

--Nicholas Carr, author of "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains", quote taken from his blog's June 12th, 2010 post: www.roughtype.com

Monday, June 7, 2010

Jacqueline Winspear

She would step aboard [the bus] and from that vantage point look down upon the world as it went about its business. As the bus drew nearer the shops of Oxford Street, already clerks and assistants were walking and running purposefully towards their day's toil. And she could see the moving throng as it formed into tributaries and streams, running ever onward towards the ocean of commerce, a day's work and a day's pay. Each of the people had a life and, if they were fortunate, a family who loved them and who they loved in return--perhaps a wife at home, a babe in the nursery, an aging parent who needed help, brothers and sisters. It was as if she had been looking down upon a landscape of human activity, a charting of everyday endeavor. As she considered, not for the first time, the part she played in the grand scheme, a question came to mind. Was she forging ahead in a stream of her own making, or was she allowing herself to be carried out by a riptide, ever onward towards...what?

-From The Mapping of Love and Death (2010)

Friday, June 4, 2010

Crazy Aunt Purl

I think we get older and scared and we make life so hard, so complex, we pick it or it picks us but either way we start getting into the details so hard and furtively that we lose the 23-year-old way we rushed up each day to see what new thing would show up. We get consumed with the very details of living life.

Plug the hell into life! That attitude of being hopeful and invincible can come back. It exists inside us. The belief in a future of endless possibilities doesn't have to go away just because we get older. We can start making a whole list of why it won't work out ... or make a list of why it will. Or screw the list, just go live some life.

The best times are when you spend more energy living and less time worrying about consequences that may never come to pass. I'm writing this not to lecture you but to remind myself to just relax.

http://www.crazyauntpurl.com/archives/2010/06/happy_hour.php