“. . . Probably no word in any language is so misused and bandied as ‘Love’. Every day you hear it trivialized. And yet we do it because we’re lazy. It’s too much effort to analyze our feeling down to what we exactly mean-and then use the correct word…”
~Morality Book

“Karma has finally come full circle; How many have I myself murdered while wandering through my narcissistic sleep?”
~Els March 10

“We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
~Anais Nin
"The only abnormality is the incapacity to love."
~Anais Nin
“There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. ”
~Anais Nin
“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
~Anais Nin
“Anxiety is love's greatest killer. It makes one feel as you might when a drowning man holds unto you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.”
~Anais Nin
“Man can never know the kind of loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in a woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. The woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which she has bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love a a taking of man within her, an act of birth and rebirth, of child-bearing and man-bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to BE. But for woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment the man rests inside of her.”
~Anais Nin
“I have the right to love many people at once and to change my prince often.”
~Anais Nin
“Don't let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.”
~Anais Nin
“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of witherings, of tarnishings.”
~Anais Nin

I have the incessant need to cry, and yet will not for there are those who thrive off of my pain. I would rather die a thousand deaths than quench their savage desire for despair.
Els ~ February 5, 2002
Please stop apologizing. In your attempts to make yourself feel better, you're simply reminding me how absolutely pathetic I am.
~Els Random thought while trying to fall asleep
At this point, all I can do is attempt to keep my head above the water line.
~Els

". . . I'll never forget the look in our neighbors' eyes when I walked by. I thought it was hate. I was too young to realize it was fear."
~Tony Kahn Son of a man blacklisted in the 1940s

"It is simply that we can all be good boys and wear our letter sweaters around and get our little degrees and find some nice girl to settle, you know, down with...Or we can blaze! Become legends in our own time, strike fear in the heart of mediocre talent everywhere! We can scald dogs, put records out of reach! Make the stands gasp as we blow into an unearthly kick from three hundred yards out! We can become God's own messengers delivering the dreaded scrolls! We can race black Satan himself till he wheezes fiery cinders down the back straightaway....They'll speak our names in hushed tones, 'those guys are animals' they'll say! We can lay it on the line, bust a gut, show them a clean pair of heels. We can sprint the turn on a spring breeze and feel the winter leave our feet! We can, by God, let our demons loose and just wail on!"
Quentin Cassidy, fictional miler in running cult classic, Once a Runner by John Parker

"If you can't win, make the fellow ahead of you break the record."

"It's the road signs, 'Beware of lions.'"
Kip Lagat, Kenyan distance runner, during the Sydney Olympics, explaining why his country produces so many great runners

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or a gazelle – when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”

“You don’t run against a bloody stop watch, do you hear?! A runner runs against himself, against the best that’s in him. Not against a dead thing of wheels and pulleys. That’s the way to be great, running against yourself. Against all the rotten mess in this world. Against God, if you’re good enough.”
~Bill Persons

"As I approached my seventeenth year...I stopped examining myself in the mirror to compare myself to the perfect beauties of movies and magazines; I decided I was beautiful-for the simple reason that I wanted to be."
~Isabel Allende Eva Luna

"'How do you do it? I mean, how does one write?'
'I just do what I can. Reality is a jumble we can't always measure or decipher, because everything is happening at the same time. While you and I are speaking here, behind your back Christopher Columbus is inventing America, and the same Indians that welcome him in the stained-glass window are still naked in a jungle a few hours from this office, and will be there a hundred years from now. I try to open a path through that maze, to put a little order in that chaos, to make life more bearable. When I write, I describe life as I would like it to be.'
'Where do you get your ideas?'
'From things that are happening and from things that happened before I was born-from newspapers, from what people tell me.'"
~Isabel Allende Eva Luna, when Eva is speaking to General Tolomeo Rodriguez

"I like guys the same way I like peanut butter...smooth and hot..."
~Brooke Cartus Random Revelation

"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away."