Dietary Suggestions in Therapy of Migraine

Avoid cokes, alcohol, particularly red wines and champagne. 7-Up is ok.
Avoid aged or strong cheese, particularly cheddar cheese.
Avoid chicken livers, pickled herring, canned figs, pods of broad beans, nuts and chocolate.
No monosodium glutamate (MSG).
Avoid cured meats such as hot dogs, bacon, ham, and salami if these cause vascular headaches.
Eat three well-balanced meals per day. Avoid skipping meals, prolonged fasting, or excessive carbohydrates.

Jacqueline Winspear

And more than anything, she wondered if one could take leave of one's senses, even if one had no previous occasions of mental incapacity, simply by being isolated from others. Is that what pushed the man over the edge of all measured thought? Were his thoughts so distilled, without the calibrating effect of a normal life led among others, that he ceased to recognize the distinction between right and wrong, between good and evil, or between having a voice and losing it? And if that were so, might an ordinary woman living alone with her memories, with her work, with the walls of her flat drawing in upon her, be at some risk of not seeing the world as it is?

--Among the Mad: A Maisie Dobbs Novel (2009)

Eknath Easwaran

“We are not nouns,” Buckminster Fuller says pointedly, “we are verbs.” People who are content with rigid images of others are thinking of themselves and others as nouns, as things. Those who keep trying to get closer to others, to understand and appreciate them more all the time, are verbs: active, creative, dynamic, able to change themselves and to make changes in the world they live in.

Eknath Easwaran

Anapekshah means always ready for the unexpected – in other words, ready for anything. It is a very daring attitude, because it means telling life, “I’m not concerned with what you send me. Good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, it doesn’t matter; I can make the best of whatever comes.” The opposite of this is not preparedness, it is rigidity.

-Eknath Easwaran, Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, Vol. II

Cary Tennis

Forgiving him does not mean that you approve of what he did. It means that you unlock the boundless human compassion that lives within you.
--From "Since You Asked" on Salon.com, December 7, 2009

Tom Ford

"I started to sink emotionally, spiritually. I became a little bit lost. Leaving Gucci, it intensified because I had been able to cling to my job and to my work and to my identity as a successful fashion designer, and all of a sudden that was gone. It forced me to really think, Well, what am I, who am I, what am I about? It took me a bit of time to figure that out. I think this happens to most people in their life if they're insightful enough to indulge it and to get through to the other side."

"Most people have a lot of problems. You can define yourself by them, or you can realize that everyone is going through what you're going through and you make the best of it and you get on with your life and you don't necessarily inflict that [on other people], because others probably have that too. They're just not inflicting it on you."

--Tom Ford, on leaving Gucci in 2004

Thomas Jefferson

I am convinced our own happiness requires that we should continue to mix with the world, and to keep pace with it....I can speak from experience on the subject. From 1793 to 1797, I remained closely at home, saw none but those who came there, and at length became very sensible of the ill effect it had upon my own mind, and of its direct and irresistible tendency to render me unfit for society, and uneasy when necessarily engaged in it. I felt enough of the effect of withdrawing from the world then to see that it led to an antisocial and misanthropic state of mind, which severely punishes him who gives in to it; and it will be a lesson I never shall forget as to myself.

--from a letter included in John Adams by David McCullough

Judith Warner

Melching, who has succeeded where any number of other women’s rights and global health organizations have failed, explained to me in an interview this summer that the secret to her group’s success lay in the fact that she had learned, through years of trial and error, that to reach people you had to meet them where they were. Respect them. Acknowledge their social norms, beliefs and practices. Find common ground. Build on shared human aspirations — for safety, for dignity, for a better life for one’s children — then discover how those shared aspirations might reasonably translate into ending practices that cause suffering. “If you come in and say, ‘You are awful people,’ people tune out and say, ‘Who do you think you are?’” she told me, speaking first from Senegal, where she has lived for the past 35 years. “Making people feel bad about what they’re doing doesn’t work; they only get defensive. What does work is getting people to discuss together what are their rights and what they mean. It’s not just a question of blaming and shaming people but educating and empowering them.”

http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/polarizing-politics-a-love-story/

Thornton Wilder

Selections from Theophilus North...

In the spring of 1926 I resigned from my job. The first days following such a decision are like the release from a hospital after a protracted illness. One slowly learns how to walk again; slowly and wonderingly one raises one's head. p1

It's wonderful the way nature strives to create harmony within ourselves. p6

The spirit of play swept away the cynicism and indifference into which I had fallen. Moreover, a readiness for adventure reawoke in me -- for risk, for intruding myself into the lives of others, for extracting fun from danger. p6

Kindness is not uncommon, but imaginative kindness can give a man a shock. p18

Benjamin Franklin

Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

Audrey Hepburn

For attractive lips, speak words of kindness.

-Audrey Hepburn, when asked about her beauty secrets

Unknown

Every smile is a direct achievement.

LL Cool J (via Twitter)

Some of us have thousands of reasons why we can't do what we want to, when all we need is one reason why we can.

E. A. Miller

...after two days in the woods, I struggled with neither my body nor my soul. There was no blizzard, no broken leg, no capture by Indians, no desire, upon seeing that first sunrise, to commit either my soul or [my dog's], no spirit of Rimbaud. I was still wrestling with pretense. I was so uncomfortable with my own perceptions that they were only real if they could be translated into narratives of faith and fortitude -- even if those narrative models made me feel like a failure! So much for a solo hiking trip -- I had brought along a vast audience, crowded with family, old lovers (even the thought of which can make me suck in my stomach) and literary critics. Talk about ill-fitting equipment: an invisible audience and borrowed stories.

I came to hike to find a story, but stories are products of past history and future audiences. I didn't know how to attend to the present.

excerpted from Equipment and Pretense, in Solo: On Her Own Adventure, ed. Susan Fox Rogers, 1996.

Dorothy Thompson

Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.