NEH

I know! We will paint the garage so it looks like the A-Team van is parked inside! That would be so awesome! You always said you wanted a mural. I have vacation days coming up and you can't be home all the time... 

Tony Schwartz

Making others feel more valued makes us feel more valuable.

~The Enduring Hunt for Personal Value, NY Times May 1, 2015

Barbara Kingsolver

Does a man become a revolutionary out of the belief he’s entitled to joy rather than submission?

--The Lacuna (2009)

Walter Benjamin

By avoiding the sight of the dying, ...one misses the moment when the meaning of a life is completed and illuminated in its ending.

-philosopher, 1930s, as reported by Deborah Lutz in NY Times See Death as a Triumph, Not a Failure (May 9, 2015)

Michael Lauchlan

Detroit Pheasant

From a window, the boss calls to us
where we load his truck with bricks.
"Turn around fellas-look."
A pheasant wades through the brown grass
across the street, vanishing
and emerging from the tangle.
A shed leans near a phone pole.
Bumpers glint from the weeds.
Blocks from the old foundation
angle through the earth.
The pheasant paces his courtyard.

We have killed the city which lived here.
The hieroglyph of its streets and rails
has joined the ancient lost tongues.
Buds unfold on a dwarf maple.
A rooster hollers.

--from Trumbull Ave. (2015)

Louise Gluck

The thing that surprised me was how big the book [of her collected poems] was, because for most of my life, I've felt I wasn't writing. Hitting my head against a wall, raging and raving to my friends because my mind is blank. Or dead. But the book was so large. It was a quite marvelous feeling - that my current sense of failure might not be so reliable.

[Emphasis added.]

Jon Stewart

Watching these channels [Fox News, CNN, MSNBC] all day is incredibly depressing. I live in a constant state of depression. I think of us as turd miners. I put on my helmet, I go and mine turds, hopefully I don’t get turd lung disease.

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Julie Holland

Medical chart reviews consistently show that doctors are more likely to give women psychiatric medications than men, especially women between the ages of 35 and 64. For some women in that age group the symptoms of perimenopause can sound a lot like depression, and tears are common. Crying isn’t just about sadness. When we are scared, or frustrated, when we see injustice, when we are deeply touched by the poignancy of humanity, we cry. And some women cry more easily than others. It doesn’t mean we’re weak or out of control. At higher doses, S.S.R.I.s make it difficult to cry. They can also promote apathy and indifference. Change comes from the discomfort and awareness that something is wrong; we know what’s right only when we feel it. If medicated means complacent, it helps no one.

When we are overmedicated, our emotions become synthetic. For personal growth, for a satisfying marriage and for a more peaceful world, what we need is more empathy, compassion, receptivity, emotionality and vulnerability, not less.

We need to stop labeling our sadness and anxiety as uncomfortable symptoms, and to appreciate them as a healthy, adaptive part of our biology.

(Julie Holland is a psychiatrist in New York and the author of Moody Bitches: The Truth About the Drugs You’re Taking, the Sleep You’re Missing, the Sex You’re Not Having, and What’s Really Making You Crazy.)

--March 1, 2015, New York Times, "Medicating Women's Feelings."

Unknown

Everybody with a womb doesn't have to have a child any more than everybody with vocal cords has to be an opera singer.

-As quoted by Gloria Steinem, Chelsea Lately, 2011

Theodore Roosevelt

The Grand Canyon fills me with awe. It is beyond comparison - beyond description; absolutely unparalleled throughout the wide world. ... Let this great wonder of nature remain as it now is. Do nothing to mar its grandeur, sublimit, and loveliness. You cannot improve on it. But what you can do is to keep it for your children, your children's children, and all who come after you, as the one great sight which every American should see.

George Harrison

I Me Mine is the ego problem. There are two 'I's: the little 'i' when people say 'I am this'; and the big 'I' - is duality and ego. There is nothing that isn't part of the complete whole. When the little 'i' merges into the big 'I' then you are really smiling!

--"I Me Mine" was a Beatles song written and performed by Harrison, as well as the title of his 1980 autobiography.

Ruth Rendell

Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Winnie the Pooh

I was going to change my shirt, but I changed my mind instead.

Alan Watts

No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater parts of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them.

Alan Watts, philosopher, writer, speaker (1915-1973)