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...he knew that what he was doing was right, more right than anything he saw anyone do, and he knew that doing right often means feeling wrong, and if you find yourself feeling wrong, you're probably doing right. (170)

--Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer
posted by Alison on 10/27/2009 05:18:00 PM


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It is one of my rules in life never to notice what I don't understand.

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (p. 34)
posted by Alison on 1/12/2009 06:58:00 AM


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The salient fact of an adolescent girl’s existence is her need for a secret emotional life—one that she slips into during her sulks and silences, during her endless hours alone in her room, or even just when she’s gazing out the classroom window while all of Modern European History, or the niceties of the passé composé, sluice past her. This means that she is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs—to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others—are met precisely by the act of reading.

--Caitlin Flanagan, "What Girls Want" The Atlantic December 2008
posted by Alison on 12/17/2008 02:16:00 AM


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When archaeology is done right, it’s frequently dull; when it’s fascinating, it’s frequently wrong.

--Benjamin Schwarz "Geography is Destiny" The Atlantic December 2008
posted by Alison on 12/17/2008 02:12:00 AM


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If you believe in a God that's all-knowing, you should trust him to know these blasphemous thoughts are mental noise and not what's in your heart,” says Jon Abramowitz, director of the Anxiety and Stress Disorders Clinic at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

New York Times, Year in Ideas 2008
Scrupulosity Disorder
By JASCHA HOFFMAN
posted by Alison on 12/15/2008 12:47:00 AM


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"The problem in politics is this: you don't get any credit for disaster averted. Going to the voters and saying, 'Boy, things really suck. But you know what? If it wasn't for me, they would suck worse.' That is not a platform on which anybody has ever gotten elected in the history of the world."

--Barney Frank, interviewed by Leslie Stahl, 60 Minutes 14 December 2008
posted by Alison on 12/15/2008 12:38:00 AM


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Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart
and try to love the questions themselves ...
Don't search for the answers,
which could not be given to you now,
because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps then, someday far in the future,
you will gradually, without even noticing it,
live your way into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke
posted by Alison on 6/19/2008 12:53:00 AM


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"It may be a fact about human beings that we notice who is fat and who is dead..."

--Ian Hacking (1986)
posted by Alison on 4/22/2008 01:08:00 PM


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Life is not like high school. Life is like junior high school. Even high school is like junior high school.

THE NEW YORK TIMES
March 16, 2008
Children's Books
All the Principal’s Men
By RICH COHEN
posted by Alison on 3/18/2008 12:20:00 PM


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A "conclusion" to a study of process is a contradiction in terms.

Jean Briggs 1998, quoted in David Berliner 2005
posted by Alison on 3/15/2008 09:02:00 PM


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Another way that you love your enemy is this:

When the opportunity presents itself for you to defeat your enemy,
that is the time which you must not do it.
There will come a time, in many instances,
when the person who hates you most,
the person who has misused you most,
the person who has gossiped about you most,
the person who has spread false rumors about you most,
there will come a time when
you will have an opportunity to defeat that person.
It might be in terms of a recommendation for a job;
it might be in terms of helping that person
to make some move in life.
That's the time you must do it.
That is the meaning of love.

In the final analysis,
love is not this sentimental something that we talk about.
It's not merely an emotional something.
Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men.
It is the refusal to defeat any individual.
When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power,
you seek only to defeat evil systems.
Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love,
but you seek to defeat the system.
loving your enemies - martin luther king jr. - 1957
posted by Alison on 3/09/2008 10:56:00 PM


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[Ruhl's] theme in “Dead Man’s Cell Phone” is the paradoxical ability of the title device (and the people who use it) both to unite and isolate. Gordon’s mother, played with glistening imperiousness by Kathleen Chalfant, ends her funeral oration by calling for a certain hymn by Rodgers and Hammerstein: “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”

“That’s right,” she adds dryly, her eulogy having been interrupted by the telltale sound of a muffled phone. “Because you’ll always have a machine in your pocket that might ring.”

But the machine in the pocket means that wherever you are present, you are potentially absent too. “I never had a cellphone,” Jean reflects. “I didn’t want to be there, you know. Like if your phone is on you’re supposed to be there. Sometimes I like to disappear. But it’s like — when everyone has their cellphones on, no one is there. It’s like we’re all disappearing the more we’re there.”

The New York Times
March 5, 2008
THEATER REVIEW | 'DEAD MAN’S CELL PHONE'
A Nagging Call to Tidy Up an Unfinished Life
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
posted by Alison on 3/06/2008 02:07:00 PM


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O Lord, hear me and turn your face to me. See me and pity me and heal me. In your eyes I have become an enigma to myself, and that is my infirmity.

-- St. Augustine, Confessions 10, 33

Deus, noverim te, noverime me
God, let me know you and know myself

--St. Augustine

"Re-examine all that you have been told... dismiss that which insults your soul.”

--Walt Whitman

(all quoted in I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory by Patricia Hampl
posted by Alison on 3/03/2008 05:49:00 PM


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"The trouble with the English is that their history happened overseas, so they don't know what it means."

--Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

"The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounselled and cannot counsel others. To write a novel mans to carry the incommensurable to extremes in the representation of human life. In the midst of life's fullness, and through the representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the profound perplexity of living."

--
Walter Benjamin, 'The storyteller", Illuminations



quoted in "DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation" by Homi K. Bhabha
posted by Alison on 2/23/2008 04:20:00 PM


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"This is how the entire course of a life can be changed -- by doing nothing."

On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan
posted by Alison on 11/05/2007 10:22:00 AM


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"War is the parent of illusions, and the first step in ending a war must be to shatter those illusions. It takes courage to accept defeat and vision to see that good can emerge from what appears to be disaster."

--Michael Rose, "How a Revolution Saved an Empire"
New York Times 5 July 2007
posted by Alison on 7/05/2007 10:59:00 AM


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"What I really mean to say is that I hate pirates. I don't like their pierced noses or their eyeliner or their tangled hair or the way they talk like Keith Richards or the big hooks they use in place of their amputated hands. Pirates are just thieves and murderers who are romanticized because they roam the high seas. Come on now, who really wants to roam the high seas, vomiting and getting scurvy, except for the half insane?"

--Heather Havrilesky, "I Like to Watch"
salon. com 1 July 2007
posted by Alison on 7/04/2007 11:11:00 AM


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"Disdain for what is foreign is, sad to say, as American as apple pie, slavery and lynching."


posted by Alison on 7/04/2007 10:56:00 AM


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"The perfect life is like the perfect dog: Neither exists, except in the fervid imaginations of humans, whose fantasies often drive their expectations beyond reality."

--Dog Days by Jon Katz
posted by Alison on 6/18/2007 10:25:00 AM


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"I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time-traveling. In this life we grow backwards. It's always the gray-haired tourists on Italian buses who can tell you something about the Etruscans." (p. 425)


"I was thinking how amazing it was that the world contained so many lives. Out in these streets people were embroiled in a thousand matters, money problems, love problems, school problems. People were falling in love, getting married, going to drug rehab, learning how to ice-skate, getting bifocals, studying for exams, trying on clothes, getting their hair cut, and getting born. And in some houses people were getting old and sick and were dying, leaving others to grieve. It was happening all the time, unnoticed, and it was the thing that really mattered. What really mattered in life, what gave it weight, was death." (pp. 518-519)


"Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye." (p. 524)

--Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
posted by Alison on 4/21/2007 10:45:00 AM


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"The point is not that, due to the limitations of his mortal sinful nature, man cannot ever become fully divine, but that due to the divine spark in him, man cannot become fully man."

--Slavoj Zizek, quoted in "Something to believe in" by Darcey Steinke
posted by Alison on 4/09/2007 12:09:00 PM


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"'After all, people may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient with each other, I think.'"

--Middlemarch by George Eliot
posted by Alison on 4/05/2007 12:17:00 PM


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"Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed."

--The Magician's Nephew by C.S. Lewis
posted by Alison on 4/05/2007 12:06:00 PM


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"You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think... But the most important thing is, even if we're apart, I'll always be with you."

--Pooh's Grand Adventure: The Search for Christopher Robin
posted by Alison on 4/05/2007 12:01:00 PM


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"Dusk, I realized then, is just an illusion, because the sun is either above the horizon or below it. And that means that day and night are linked in a way that few things are; there cannot be one without the other, yet they cannot exist at the same time. How would it feel, I remember wondering, to be always together yet forever apart?"

--The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks
posted by Alison on 4/05/2007 11:53:00 AM


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"'If no one fought except on his own conviction, there would be no wars,' he said.

"And that would be splendid,' said Pierre."

--War amd Peace by Leo Tolstoy
posted by Alison on 4/02/2007 11:58:00 AM


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"None will ever be true Parisian who has not learned to wear a mask of gaiety over his sorrows and one of sadness, boredom, or indifference over his inward joy. You know that one of your friends is in trouble; do not try to console him: he will tell you that he is already comforted; but, should he have met with good fortune, be careful how you congratulate him: he thinks it is so natural that he is surprised that you should speak of it. In Paris, our lives are one masked ball..."

--The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
posted by Alison on 4/02/2007 11:55:00 AM


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"'I was born to be your rival,' she said simply. 'And you mine. We're sisters, aren't we?'"

--The Other Boleyn Girl by Phillipa Gregory
posted by Alison on 4/02/2007 11:52:00 AM


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One of the great pleasures of a reading life is picking up an old, familiar novel thinking that rereading it will mean a kind of reminding, when, in fact, the novel makes itself new all over again. It is as if the novel holds itself apart, waiting for real life to erase enough in us to make us suitable readers once more.

--Verlyn Klinkenborg in "If Jane Austen Were Among Us Now, Whom Would She Cast as Herself?" New York Times, 1 April 2007
posted by Alison on 4/01/2007 01:55:00 PM


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"If there is one place on the face of the earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India..."

--Romain Rolland, from Life of Ramakrishna
posted by Alison on 3/26/2007 10:00:00 PM


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"To go buy a grocery item entails driving to a giant depressing mall, parking, entering a giant depressing supermarket where whatever you want is at least two miles away down an unflatteringly lit aisle, scanning your items yourself at the checkout in a snit of frustration, locating your car in the giant lot and ... then driving home in traffic. Any sane person would compulsively refrigerate just to avoid trips to the store."

--Peggy Grodinsky, quoted in "The Big Chill" by Regina Schrambling at Salon.com
posted by Alison on 3/21/2007 10:47:00 AM


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Harbour: What's it like, being dead?
Wilbur: It's dull as dishwater. It's silent and completely dark... it's like being in Wales.

--Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself, screenplay by Lone Scherfig & Anders Thomas Jensen
posted by Alison on 3/06/2007 09:01:00 AM


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Orlando: If I were a man...
Shelmerdine: You?
Orlando: I might choose not to risk my life for an uncertain cause. I might think that freedom won by death is not worth having. In fact...
Shelmerdine: You might choose not to be a real man at all. Say, if I were a woman...
Orlando: You?
Shelmerdine: I might choose not to sacrifice my life caring for my children, nor my children's children, nor to drown anonymously in the milk of female kindness, but instead, say, to go abroad. Would I then be...
Orlando: A real woman?

--Orlando, screenplay by Sally Potter, from the novel by Virgina Woolf
posted by Alison on 3/06/2007 08:57:00 AM


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Bridget Maher -- no relation, and none planned -- of the Family Research Council says giving girls the vaccine [for HPV] is bad, because the girls "may see it as a license to engage in premarital sex." Which is really a stretch. People don't get the vaccine for typhoid and say, "Great, now I can drink the sewer water in Bombay."

--Bill Maher, "Christians crusade against cancer vaccine"
posted by Alison on 3/06/2007 08:51:00 AM


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Sometimes it's impossible to know if your brain really is functioning as it should.

--The Book of Ruth by Jane Hamilton
posted by Alison on 2/05/2007 09:41:00 PM


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Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.

--Martin Luther King, Jr.

posted by Alison on 1/16/2007 02:07:00 PM


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I've always thought that New Year's Eve is proof that human beings are essentially optimistic creatures. Despite hundreds of years of pathetic parties and hellish hangovers, we continue to cling to the notion that it's possible to have fun on that night. It's not. There's too much pressure, too many expectations, too few bathrooms.

The truth is, I began volunteering to work on New Year's Eve as a way to avoid doing something social...

--Andersoon Cooper, Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival
posted by Alison on 1/04/2007 01:52:00 PM


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Let no one be discouraged by the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills, against misery and ignorance, injustice and violence. ... Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of our generation.

Robert F. Kennedy
posted by Alison on 12/26/2006 12:04:00 PM


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Those who are confident of their faith are not threatened but enlarged by the different faiths of others. ... There are, surely, many ways of arriving at this generosity of spirit and each faith may need to find its own.

-Sir Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the British Commonwealth
quoted in "The Peaceful Crusader" by Thomas Cahill, New York Times Op-Ed, 25 December 2006
posted by Alison on 12/25/2006 10:35:00 PM


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"Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world."

Francis P. Church in his famous 1897 New York Sun editorial, "Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus."
posted by Alison on 12/24/2006 09:40:00 PM


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He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands.

***

When he awoke it was dawn. Or something like dawn. The light was watery, dim and incomparably sad. Vast, grey, gloomy hills rose up all around them and in between the hills there was a wide expanse of black bog. Stephen had never seen a landscape so calculated to reduce the onlooker to utter despair in an instant.

"This is one of your kingdoms, I suppose, sir?" he said.

"My kingdoms?" exclaimed the gentleman in surprize. "Oh, no! This is Scotland!"

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
posted by Alison on 12/10/2006 03:09:00 PM


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I quickly realized that "conflict-free" was a dense little black hole of a phrase, created in a collision of good and cynical intentions, and packed with an almost infinite amount of historical suffering. And I got a familiar feeling from it, the same kind of gravity-defying feeling I can get from the countless other black holes of ambiguity that American life is full of, and that I so often encounter when I buy things -- like the aforementioned cars and houses, or even groceries. It's what conservatives like to call "liberal guilt," I guess, and I suppose that's pretty accurate, although I also like to think of it as "having a clue."


"A Hard Rock" By Peter Birkenhead, salon.com, Dec. 7, 2006
posted by Alison on 12/07/2006 01:06:00 PM


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"Ultimately neither withdrawing from the changing world nor a hegemonic quest to run it can lead any nation to peace, stability, and prosperity. And ultimately, the only truly practical coping mechanisms are those that embody tolerance, inclusion, diversity, and, yes, trust and the mechanisms to enforce trust -- along with the fundamental humanistic values of equality and the right to self expression."

Shutting out the Sun by Michael Zielenzeger
quoted in "New Book Chronicles Japan's Spiritual Crisis" By Michael Sandlin, PopMatters. December 6, 2006.
posted by Alison on 12/06/2006 02:48:00 PM


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"Why does watching a dog be a dog fill one with happiness? And why does it make one feel, in the best sense of the word, human?"

--Jonathan Safran Foer, "My Life as a Dog," The New York Times, 27 November 2006
posted by Alison on 11/27/2006 11:28:00 AM


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Do not pray for easy lives; pray to be stronger. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for powers equal to your tasks. Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle, but you yourself shall be a miracle. Every day you shall wonder at yourself, at the richness of life which has come to you by the grace of God.

- Phillips Brooks
posted by Alison on 11/25/2006 03:05:00 PM


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"Every ballot - the most basic element of free government - is by definition a piece of nonviolence, symbolizing hard-won or hopeful consent to raise politics above anarchy and war."

--Taylor Branch, "Globalizing King's Legacy," The New York Times, January 16, 2006
posted by Alison on 1/16/2006 01:16:00 PM


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"A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth."

- Martin Luther King Jr., in his speech "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence"
posted by Alison on 11/13/2005 01:31:00 PM


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"Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary."

--Reinhold Niebuhr
posted by Alison on 9/18/2005 12:56:00 AM


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What van Gogh saw
by Raphaelle Kosek

Van Gogh saw
the way our hearts burn
like the pinwheel stars
swirling in the night-mad sky,

the way our spirits,
bent and bruised in life's field,
reach endlessly upward
like the cypress trees
full of knotty whorls
curling upwards to mingle with,
and plead benediction from,
the sea-waved sky,

the way wild-maned sunflowers
are almost dizzy with themselves
and the power of heavy seed
flaming within them.

Lose an ear,
lose your mind.
Lose your life,

while your resolve scatters
like crows over the wheatfield
and Lazarus forever blooms
under a fiery sun.

This poem appeared in the July-August 1997 issue of Sojourners.
posted by Alison on 8/18/2005 11:53:00 AM


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"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. And inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."

--Groucho Marx
posted by Alison on 6/23/2005 02:15:00 PM


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