Penny Reid

Stay away from the normals, the small-minded people who fill their brains with small-minded pursuits, who blend in and keep up with the Joneses. Those people will tear you down and make you boring. Instead, surround yourself with the weirds. With the misfits, oddballs, and outcasts. Because the normals, bless their hearts, have no idea how to have fun.

--Beard Science (2016)

Dalai Lama

Do not let the behavior of others destroy your inner peace. 

Abra Berens

A bean plant's only goal is to create seed to ensure the next generation. Green beans are the immature seed pod of the plant, which wants to swell the seeds inside and allow them to dry, protecting the seed through the winter only to be activated by warm, wet soil in the spring and start again. I always anthropomorphize the plants after I pluck their seed pod--be it a green bean or ready tomato--imagining them to say, "Fine. I'll ripen another one."

--in Ruffage (2019). Chronicle Books. p. 222.

Dolly Parton

Question: Have you been on any of the rides [at Dollywood]?

DP: I don't ride the rides. I never have. I have a tendency to get motion sickness. Also, I am a little bit chicken. With all my hair I got so much to lose, like my wig, or my shoes. I don't like to get messed up. I'm going to have some handsome man mess it up--I don't want some ride doing it.

Richard Bach

"Negative attachments, Richard. If you really want to remove a cloud from your life, you do not make a big production out of it, you just relax and remove it from your thinking. That's all there is to it."

“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.”

Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

Amy Sedaris

It has been said that crafting is the art of transforming things nobody wants into things people feel bad about throwing away. 

At Home with Amy Sedaris, "Game Night" 

Buckminster Fuller

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Stephanie Pederson

"A 2015 study at the University of London found that participants who multitasked during cognitive tasks experienced declines in IQ scores that were similar to what they'd expect if they had smoked marijuana or stayed up all night. IQ drops of 15 points for multitasking men lowered their scores to the average range of an eight-year-old child." (p. 140)

"Do something about all those cords and chargers. Nothing clutters the look of a room like a tangle of cords and power strips. Run cords through the wall, use a cord management system, or mount power strips to the underside of bookshelves, side tables, cabinetry, and sofas." (p. 47, emphasis added)

"While hygge cannot be described in a single English word, it can be explained in several. Hygge is experiencing quiet joy in any given moment. It is the complete absence of anything annoying or emotionally overwhelming. It is taking pleasure from the things around you. Like the Danes themselves, hygge is a practical word, one that encourages you to create beauty in your daily interactions, objects, and activities. It is the Danish ability to spin the functional into an almost spiritual experience. It is the magic of turning any situation into a moment of coziness." (p. xv)

--American Cozy: Hygge-inspired ways to create comfort and happiness (2018)

Jada Yuan

For many, the 52 Places  traveler position is a dream job. For Jada, that dream, while not always totally dreamy, is a daily reality. And in that reality, you sometimes land in a hotel where there is ice cream for breakfast. Some readers had a few things to say about ice cream. In Cincinnati, the consensus was clear: go to Graeter's. And get the blackberry chip—in a pretzel cone. And when someone suggests a chocolate factory, never, ever, say no.

New York Times, Travel section, p. 5, January 6, 2019.

DLK

N: I'm going to get changed and then head outside to put the snow tires on the cars.

D: Should I help you?

N: No, it's really a one-person job.

D: That answer is the best gift you could have ever given me. 

NEH

N: We have bacon for tomorrow. I can take it out of the freezer if you want.

D: We have bacon? I didn't know we had bacon. 

N: Yeah.

D: Where did you get bacon? 

N: At Menards.

D: You did not.

N: Yes.

D: You did not get bacon at Menards! 

N: Yes.

D: You're married now! You don't buy bacon at the hardware store! 

JK Simmons

I think the majority of the time in my work, and I hope in my life, the primary motivation for most behavior is love.

Interview in The New York Times, Sunday, January 21, 2018.

Chelsea Tornetto

​​A story is often the most effective way to create personal connections between very different people. Reading a novel allows us to see the world through someone else’s eyes, remove the context we are used to and replace it with something new. We are more prepared to accept things beyond our own experiences because we know we are reading a ‘‘story,’’ and yet we also actively search for similarities between our own lives and the lives of the characters. A novel can begin to open students’ minds and shape their hearts, without doing battle against their sense of self.

From Allowing In the Light, Teaching Tolerance Issue 57, Fall 2017

https://www.tolerance.org/magazine/fall-2017/allowing-in-the-light

Darcy Lockman

Ideals are no substitute for behavior.

From "Where do kids learn to undervalue women? From their parents." Washington Post, 11/10/17

Kalyanee Mam

When you really love what you’re doing—when you really care about what you’re doing—you don’t even have to exert confidence, it’s just who you are. It’s just being. But when you’re not sure of who you are and where you belong and what your path is, sometimes you impose confidence on yourself which becomes very artificial and I see it in people and it’s not confidence, but arrogance.

I think when you’re really truly at ease with yourself, there’s a lot of comfort and humility and compassion for others who may not be as comfortable as you are.

Kalyanee Mam, documentary film maker, as interviewed on She Does podcast, 9/9/2015.