Nathaniel Hawthorne

We are as happy as people can be, without making themselves ridiculous, and might be even happier; but, as a matter of taste, we choose to stop short at this point.

--in a letter to his sister about his wife

Mark Andrews

There are no villains in our world, really. Most of our lives are filled with, "I've caused the problem myself. Why did I cause the problem?" It's our own agendas. It's our own vanity. It's our pride. It's our envy, all those things.

The one thing I love about telling stories is, we spend our whole lives going in and out of being better or worse, in our own character. But in a movie, the character transforms into the best they're going to be. So you take a whole life, what we live, that we have to constantly work at, and we shove it down into 80 minutes so we can see what this person goes through. We can see the human condition at high speed. That creates more intensity and more stakes in the story, but what we get out of that is like [claps], "That person overcame everything, and boy, that's inspirational. That's what I'm going to do." It empowers us.

--director of Pixar's Brave in an interview. The Onion's A.V. Club, June 21, 2012, p. 26.

Stanley Plumly

This was the fall, October, when Ohio,
like almost every other part of the country,
is beginning to be mortally beautiful,
the great old hardwoods letting go
their various scarlet, yellow,
and leopard-spotted leaves one by one. 

--from "Glenn Gould" (2012)

Richard Strauss

I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.

Linda Ellerbee

He was generous with his affection, given to great, awkward, engulfing hugs, and I can remember so clearly the smell of his hugs, all starched shirt, tobacco, Old Spice and Cutty Sark. Sometimes I think I've never been properly hugged since.

From Move On

Tom Waits

Go out there and take the world by the tail, pull it down, wrap it around and put it in your pocket.

Bill Clinton

[T]oo many of us spend too much time worrying about advancement or personal gain at the expense of effort. We might fail, but we need to get caught trying.

Charles M. Blow

There is no wrong time to do the right thing.

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/liberty-and-justice-for-all/

Harry S. Truman

You don't set a fox to watching chickens just because he has a lot of
experience in the hen house.

David Hume

Reading and sauntering and lounging and dozing, which I call thinking,
is my supreme happiness.

He is happy whose circumstances suit his temper but he is more
excellent who can suit his temper to any circumstances.

via Maestro Flatt

Regarding Beethoven's Pastorale Symphony: "The 'storm' isn't about the weather."

--as quoted by Maestro Flatt at 3/30/12 Denver philharmonic concert

Annie Murphy Paul

It [reading fiction] is an exercise that hones our real-life social skills.... [I]ndividuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective. This relationship persisted even after the researchers accounted for the possibility that more empathetic individuals might prefer reading novels. A 2010 study...found a similar result in preschool-age children: the more stories they had read to them, the keener their theory of mind.

Fiction, Dr. Oatley notes, “is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up myriad interacting instances of cause and effect. Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life.”

These findings will affirm the experience of readers who have felt illuminated and instructed by a novel, who have found themselves comparing a plucky young woman to Elizabeth Bennet or a tiresome pedant to Edward Casaubon. Reading great literature, it has long been averred, enlarges and improves us as human beings. Brain science shows this claim is truer than we imagined.

--"Your Brain on Fiction," New York Times, March 17, 2012

Kahlil Gibran

Hate is a dead thing. Who of you would be a tomb?

Ring Lardner

He looked at me as if I were a side dish he hadn't ordered.

Bill Watterson

A day can really slip by when you're deliberately avoiding what you're supposed to do.