Rita Mae Brown:

Anytime you can stretch yourself, add to your craft, do it!

Rita Will, p. 438

Robert Frost:

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew.  Writing a poem is discovering.

Steve Jobs:

I started thinking that maybe Thomas Edison did a lot more to improve the world than Karl Marx and Neem Karoli Baba put together.

Maya Angelou:

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

Frank Schaeffer:

The New Atheists, like their evangelical/fundamentalist counterparts, aren't on an intellectual journey.  They are already at their destination, all i's dotted and all t's crossed.  Everything they encounter is run through a fixed ideological grid.

Patience With God, p. 11

Alexandra Petri:

Poetry, taken back to its roots, is just the process of making — and making you listen.

"Is poetry dead?"

Anne Lamott:

Domestic pain can be searing, and it is usually what does us in.  It's almost indigestible: death, divorce, old age, drugs; brain-damaged children, violence, senility, unfaithfulness.  Good luck with figuring it out.  It unfolds, and you experience it, and it is so horrible and endless that you could almost give up a dozen times.  But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.

Help, Thanks, Wow, p. 47

Rita Mae Brown:

I will always be grateful to the University of Florida for teaching me that those in power will do almost anything to stay in power.  They will lie, cheat, steal and occasionally kill or drive people to their death.  It matters little if they have a program to better the community or not.  Once a person or group has power they do not willingly give it up.  You must seize it from them.

Rita Will, p. 195

John Blake:

Appeal to people's emotion, not their rationale, when trying to rally public opinion.  Abolitionists had tried to rouse the conscience of Americans for years by appealing to their Christian and Democratic sensibilities.  They largely failed.  But (Harriet Beecher) Stowe's [Uncle Tom's Cabin] did something all those speeches didn't do.  It told a story.

"What 'Lincoln' misses and another Civil War film gets right"

Steve Jobs:

We wanted to more richly experience why we were alive, not just make a better life.  So people went in search of things.  The great thing that came from that time was to realize that there was definitely more to life than the materialism of the late Fifties and early Sixties.  We were going in search of something deeper.

Martin Luther King Jr.:

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

Frank Schaeffer:

The process of growing up as an individual and as a species never stops.  The lessons implicit in our "recruit training" led us to question the religion that was part of our earlier "boot camp."  If this unprovable idea of mine has a nugget of sense, it suggests that perhaps God leads His children to and through atheism as a stage on their journey.  Maybe He does this for the same reason as any parents who want their children to grow up and think for themselves.

Patience With God, p. 179

Jonathan Safran Foer:

Books are slow, books are quiet.  The Internet is fast and loud.

The Foer questions: Literary wunderkind turns 35

Anne Lamott:

My belief is that when you're telling the truth, you're close to God.

Help, Thanks, Wow, p. 6

Rita Mae Brown:

I believe an ounce of work is worth a pound of theory.

Rita Will, p.233

William Jelani Cobb:

On the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, it's worth recalling that slavery was made unsustainable largely through the efforts of those who were enslaved.  The record is replete with enslaved blacks -- even so-called house slaves -- who poisoned slaveholders, destroyed crops, "accidentally" burned down buildings.

"What 'Lincoln' misses and another Civil War film gets right"

Max Frisch:

Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.

Seth Godin:

The winners have turned initiative into a passion and a practice.

Poke the Box, p. 5

Frank Schaeffer:

Loving God while you are selling Him is close to impossible.

Patience With God, p. 145

Steve Jobs:

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.  Because almost everything -- all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure -- these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.  Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.

Stanford Commencement Address 2005

Anne Lamott:

You may in fact be wondering what I even mean when I use the word "prayer."  It's certainly not what TV Christians mean.  It's not for display purposes, like plastic sushi or neon.  Prayer is private, even when we pray with others.  It is communication from the heart to that which surpasses understanding.  Let's say it is communication from one's heart to God.  Or if that is too triggering or ludicrous a concept for you, to the Good, the force that is beyond our comprehension but that in our pain or supplication or relief we don't need to define or have proof of or any established contact with.  Let's say it is what the Greeks called the Really Real, what lies within us, beyond the scrim of our values, positions, convictions, and wounds.  Or let's say it is a cry from deep within to Life or Love, with capital L's.

Help, Thanks, Wow, p. 1-2

Rita Mae Brown:

Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment.

Rita Will, p. 447

Erica Armstrong Dunbar:

There's this perception that good old (Abraham) Lincoln and a few others gave freedom to black people.  The real story is that black people and people like (Frederick) Douglass wrestled their freedom away.

"What 'Lincoln' misses and another Civil War film gets right"

Michael Greenberg:

Most people are disturbed when an experience they've had is told for them -- and the closer the person is to you, the more he or she is apt to feel wronged.  What captures their attention is not the scrupulous portrait you've drawn, but rather the unpleasantness of seeing themselves as a manipulated object in the drama of their own life.

Beg, Borrow, Steal, p. 205-206

Seth Godin:

It's extremely difficult to find smart people willing to start useful projects.  Because sometimes what you start doesn't work.  The fact that it doesn't work every time should give you confidence, because it means you're doing something that frightens others.

Poke the Box, p. 28

Frank Schaeffer:

At a time when Islamist extremists strap bombs to themselves and blow up women and children; when America has just come staggering out of the searing thirty-year-plus embrace of the reactionary, dumb-as-mud Religious Right; and when some people are bullying, harassing, and persecuting gay men and women in the name of religion, it's understandable that the sort of decent people most of us would want for neighbors run from religion.  There is a problem, though, for those who flee religion expecting to find sanity in unbelief: The madness never was about religion, let alone caused by faith in God.  It was and is about how we evolved and what we evolved into.

Patience With God, p. 3

Tertullian:

That which is infinite is known only to itself.

Anne Lamott:

I do not know much about God and prayer, but I have come to believe, over the past twenty-five years, that there's something to be said about keeping prayer simple.  Help.  Thanks.  Wow.

Help, Thanks, Wow, p. 1

Rita Mae Brown:

Life is too important to take seriously.

Rita Will, p. 270

Michael Greenberg:

My offense was simply to have told their story.

Beg, Borrow, Steal, p. 190

Austin Kleon:

Don't worry about a grand scheme or unified vision for your work.  Don't worry about unity -- what unifies your work is the fact that you made it.  One day, you'll look back and it will all make sense.

Steal Like an Artist, p. 72