Isabel Rogers

The harpist was setting herself up between the first and second violins and squidging the horns over a bit. She was extremely glamorous, and wore her jet-black hair scraped tightly into a bun on the very top of her head, into which she had pushed her orchestral pencil. Even though it was an ordinary Saturday afternoon in a rundown school in south London, she wore full and professional-level flawless make-up and radiated a perfume that made her nearest neighbours' throats itch. Her name was Bozenka.

David introduced the conductor to Bozenka before they started playing. 'Lovely to meet you,' said eliot, shaking a hand which clasped his in an icy ratchet grip. 'Thank you for coming along for your few bars of Mussorgsky. We very much appreciate it.'

'It is the way of the harp, to deliver perfection in tiny pockets,' said Bozenka in a heavily accented low voice. 'But what else can we do before death?'

Walking back to his podium, he tried to shake the feeling that death could be summoned by a harpist.

~Isabel Rogers, in Bold as Brass p.231

Clive Davis

There's gotta be misses. I didn't sign Meat Loaf.  He was an unlikely figure, visually. So I passed. 

"Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives" (2017). 

Randall Darwall

I think it's important to understand that process is a means to a way to discover what's most important in the end product and how can you adapt the process to really reflect your own point of view and your own unique personality. So I am always looking at each step of the process as a way to answer the question, "Why would I bother going through these extra steps?" Whether it's tying on, whether it's winding the warp on, whether it's choosing the weft, whether it's throwing the shuttle. [T]hey are answers that only human beings can discover in the act of doing it. [W]eavers tend to be looked upon as dinosaurs who are doing something that doesn't really need to be done. Why would you bother? I think that we have something to offer the world that is best expressed through interlacing threads. This is not busywork. This is not "happy hands and happy faces." This is very essential stuff. 

Craft in America, season 4, episode 1. 

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.