Rainer Maria Rilke:

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart.  Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language.  Do not now look for the answers.  They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them.  It is a question of experiencing everything.  At present you need to live the question.  Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

Letters to a Young Poet

Austin Kleon:

Artists aren't magicians.  There's no penalty for revealing your secrets.

"How to Steal Like an Artist (And 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me)"

Hugh MacLeod:

You can only live life to the full in the moment.  The past and the present are distractions.

Evil Plans, p. 120

Rachel Held Evans:

If there's one thing I know for sure, it's that serious doubt -- the kind that leads to despair -- begins not when we start asking God questions but when, out of fear, we stop.

Evolving in Monkey Town, p. 226

Betty DeGeneres:

We have an idea that everybody else is "normal," and we keep our concerns secret, in the hope that we can pretend them away.  When we finally admit them, it turns out that a lot of other people have the same secrets.  In the end, nobody is normal -- or at least nobody is your idea of "normal."

Love, Ellen, p. 103

Sarah Schulman:

In order for us to come to a cultural agreement that homophobia within the family is wrong, we need one basic shared assumption: homophobia is not the fault of gay people.  Homophobia is not caused by gay people.  There is nothing that a gay person can ever do to justify it.  Homophobia is a pathological manifestation of heterosexual culture.  As a pure prejudice, it is wrong and as social currency within and outside of the family, it is despicable.

Ties That Bind, p. 23

Ray Charles:

I was born with music inside me.  Music was one of my parts.  Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart.  Like my blood.  It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene.  It was a necessity for me...like food or water.

Michelle Richmond:

(The Sunday lunch crowd in the Deep South has surely done more to tarnish the reputation of fundamentalist Christians than Ted Haggard and Jim Bakker combined.)

Don't Quit Your Day Job, p. 179

Austin Kleon:

One of the things I've learned as an artist is that the more open you are about sharing your passions, the more people love your art.

"How to Steal Like an Artist (And 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me)"

Hugh MacLeod:

Life is too short not to do something that matters.

Evil Plans, p. 105

Rachel Held Evans:

Those who say that having childlike faith means not asking questions haven't met too many children.

Evolving in Monkey Town, p. 225

Betty DeGeneres:

The great irony of the pretense of normality is that it is so commonplace.

Love, Ellen, p. 103

Sarah Schulman:

Not thinking is one of their privileges.  After all, in every system of domination, the dominant group knows only about themselves, while the members of the subordinate group know about their own lives as well as the lives of the dominant group members.  So, those with the most power have the least information about how other people live.  If straight people were forced to think about and be accountable for their behavior toward us, they would have to justify their actions.  And that would be pretty hard to do.

Ties That Bind, p. 22-23

Walt Whitman:

... re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem ...

Leaves of Grass, Preface

Larry Brown:

I've seen that distant dream come true, a book with my name on it.  It hasn't been easy and I doubt if it ever will be.  I don't think it was meant to be easy.  I think that from the first it was meant to be hard for the few people who came along and wanted to write it, because the standards are so high and the rewards so great, in my case, making readers look into the hearts of the people I've chosen to write about.

Don't Quit Your Day Job, p. 57

Austin Kleon:

Step 1: Wonder at something.  Step 2: Invite others to wonder with you.

"How to Steal Like an Artist (And 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me)"

Hugh MacLeod:

What's far more interesting is not what we create, but how we create it, why we create it.

Evil Plans, p. 105

Rachel Held Evans:

Our best answers in defense of Christianity have always been useless clanging symbols unless our lives have inspired the world to ask.

Evolving in Monkey Town, p. 223

Betty DeGeneres:

Of course, at the time when I was growing up, gays and lesbians were in the closet so much that I had no idea they even existed until I went off to college.  And even then, my exposure was limited to innuendo and rumor.  So although I was not predisposed to be prejudiced, I was totally ignorant.

Love, Ellen, p. 29