LBJ

When you put your foot on a man's neck and hold him down for three hundred years, and then you let him up, what's he going to do? He's going to knock your block off.

Jens Voigt Facts

Once the CSC team bus broke down and Jens Voigt had to push it. French police pulled them over and detained the team for more than hour before letting Jens go with just a speeding ticket.

Heather McHugh

I have always lived on waterfronts. If you live on the edge of an enormous mountain or an enormous body of water, it's harder to think of yourself as being so important. That seems useful to me, spiritually.

Roger Housden

Day by day, tiny specks of us float away. No matter which exercise or diet regime we follow, no matter which self-help guru or meditation practice we follow, nothing will dispel the reality that we are not built to last. Death is our supreme limitation, the final proof that perfection was never meant to be part of human experience.

A hundred years from now, there will be all new people. Sooner rather than later, we shall not be here: no eyes, no nose, no ears, no tongue, no mind. No you or me. Gone, and who knows where, if anywhere.

Yet knowing the extent of our limitation, feeling our soon-not-to-be-hereness in our bones, is the best condition we can have for waking up to the miracle that we are here now. That is the brilliance of the human design plan; the built-in "defect" is the very thing that can spur us to drink down the full draught as it comes to us. Better to taste this gritty, imperfect life we have than to defer it to some more perfect future that will never come.

From Perfectly Imperfect article.

DK

It's only two layers, but I packed it with chicken.

Mary Harris "Mother" Jones

Whatever the fight, don't be ladylike.

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I said if he had stolen a railroad, he would be a United States Senator.

Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living!

Tina Fey

So my unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: "Is this person in between me and what I want to do?" If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you're in charge, don't hire the people who were jerky to you.

--from Bossypants (2011)

Stephen Vincent Benét

Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.

Kyle Crichton

Life's a pretty precious and wonderful thing. You can't sit down and let it lap around you...you have to plunge into it. And you can't save it, you can't store it up, you can't horde it in a vault. You've got to taste it. You've got to use it. The more you use, the more you have...that's the miracle of it! 

--from The Happiest Millionaire (1956) 

David McCullough

There's no such thing, no such thing. We're all the products of the teachers, the parents, the friends, the rivals that have shaped us along the way.

--on explaining his disbelief in the idea of the self-made man

As revealed in a fortune cookie

The difficulties of life are intended to make us better, not bitter.

DK

Much writing remains;
Deadlines approach with grim speed.
Think before knocking.

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)