Quote of the Day

But for me writing is a necessity.  I exist in sentences.  I forget my sense of failure.  I forget time.  I forget that I'm aging.  I forget that one day I'll die.  Revising sentences is an act of hope, and connecting with a reader is the only leap of faith I'll ever take.

-- Tom Grimes, Mentor, p. 132

Quote of the Day

When gay people come out, we shrug off the pressure to conform about something so enormous -- sexual orientation -- that the shrugging off of other, lesser pressures to conform comes easy.

-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 126

Quote of the Day

I think everyone has one day like this, and some people have more than one.  It's the day of the accident, the midlife crisis, the breakdown, the meltdown, the walkout, the sellout, the giving up, giving away, or giving in.  The day you stop drinking, or the day you start.  The day you know things will never be the same again.

-- Heather Sellers, You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know, p. 82

Quote of the Day

(My junior year of college) I discovered short poems too, like [William Carlos Williams'] "The Red Wheelbarrow."  I became fascinated with trying to say a lot with a little.

-- Linford Detweiler

Quote of the Day

In the minds of evangelicals, they were recreating the Puritan's self-exile from England by looking for a purer and better place, this time not a geographical "place" but a sanctuary within their minds (and in inward-looking schools and churches) undisturbed by facts. Like the Puritans, the post-Roe (when abortion was made legal) evangelicals (and many other conservative Christians) withdrew from the mainstream not because they were forced to but because the society around them was, in their view, fatally sinful and, worse, addicted to facts rather than to faith. And yet having dropped out (to use a 1960s phrase), the Evangelicals nevertheless kept on demanding that regarding "moral" and "family" matters the society they'd renounced nonetheless had to conform to their beliefs.

-- Frank Schaeffer, "Send the Bill for the Shutdown to the Religious Right"

Quote of the Day

Perspective: everyone alive 150 years ago is dead now.  Just do something small every day and it will add up to something substantial.

-- Austin Kleon

Quote of the Day

Right now, imagine what you'd do if it absolutely didn't matter what people thought of you. Got it? Good. Never go back.

-- Martha Beck, "10 Life Lessons You Should Unlearn"

Quote of the Day

... by choosing to define myself exclusively as a literary writer I've chosen a profession and a life that promise to humble me.

-- Tom Grimes, Mentor, p. 132

Quote of the Day

Religious belief is clearly a choice.  It may be a choice your parents made for you, or a choice your grandparents made for you, but it is a choice.  (What are all those Mormon missionaries doing out there?  They're trying to get you to choose their religion.)  Discriminating against people based on their choice of religious belief is illegal and should be illegal.  Arguing that gay people shouldn't complain about discrimination because we can "choose to be straight" is like arguing that Jewish people shouldn't complain about anti-Semitism because they can "choose to be baptized."

-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 69

Quote of the Day

More than anything else, laying out the story of how I came to see has brought me clarity.

-- Heather Sellers, You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know, p. 353

Quote of the Day

My favorite poet is probably Mary Oliver.  She can look at the earth and remind me that being alive here is an unspeakable gift, every blade of grass, every cloud adrift, every bird song, every polished piece of glass washed up on a beach is nothing short of a miracle.

-- Linford Detweiler

Quote of the Day

Science marched forth, demolishing fundamentalist "facts" with dispassionate argument. So science also became our enemy. Rather than rethink our beliefs, conservative religionists like me (and "Billy") decided to renounce secular higher education and denounce it as "elitist." Thus, to be uninformed, even willfully and proudly so, came to be considered a Godly virtue. And since misery loves company, the evangelicals' quest, for instance when evangelicals dominated the Texas textbook committees, was to strive to "balance" the teaching of evolution with creationism and damn the facts.

-- Frank Schaeffer, "Send the Bill for the Shutdown to the Religious Right"

Quote of the Day

When people ask you the same question over and over, you write a book...

-- Austin Kleon

Quote of the Day

Studies show that people who worry about mistakes shut down, but those who are relaxed about doing badly soon learn to do well.  Success is built on failure.
 
-- Martha Beck, "10 Life Lessons You Should Unlearn"

Quote of the Day

Deepening our relationship, though, meant I had a greater chance of being rejected by him if I let him down in any way.  I couldn't admit this outright, but I couldn't conceal my anxiety, either.  I'm not good at that.  This is why I write.  It's my way of controlling my world and my emotions.  I focus on sentences.  For several hours a day, nothing else matters.  I live inside language.  And while I'm often frustrated by writing's difficulty, I'm also at peace.

-- Tom Grimes, Mentor, p. 33

Quote of the Day

The failure to provide young people with comprehensive sex education drives up the abortion rates in blue states and the rates of single parenthood in red states.  A conservative who claims to oppose abortion and single parenthood shouldn't support abstinence-only sex ed, as it only seems to drive up the rates of both.

-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 45

Quote of the Day

I loved when books did this: when the book itself seemed to recognize who was reading it, and what would be best to reveal.

-- Heather Sellers, You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know, p. 338

Quote of the Day

[Annie Dillard's] book of found poetry, Mornings Like This, is one of my favorite books of all time.  She pulls lines from an old newspaper, or one of Van Gogh's letters, or from an old biology textbook, and rearranges them into little assembled works of art, with moving and hilarious results.  The book is a good reminder that there is great stuff coming at us from everywhere if we can only learn how to receive.

-- Linford Detweiler

Quote of the Day

What they never admitted was…we evangelicals were self-banished from mainstream institutions, not only because we evangelicals' political views on social issues conflicted with most people's views, but also because we evangelicals found ourselves holding the short end of the intellectual stick.

-- Frank Schaeffer, "Send the Bill for the Shutdown to the Religious Right"

Quote of the Day

You have to be in the world to understand what the spiritual is about, and you have to be spiritual in order to truly be able to accept what the world is about.

-- Mary Oliver

Quote of the Day

Even though the law is almost identical to that of their last presidential nominee's in Massachusetts, the GOP is prepared to destroy both the American government and the global economy to stop it... This is the point of no return - a black president doing something for black citizens (even though the vast majority of beneficiaries of Obamacare will be non-black). I regard this development as one of the more insidious and anti-constitutional acts of racist vandalism against the American republic in my adult lifetime... If we cave to their madness, we may unravel our system of government, something one might have thought conservatives would have opposed. Except these people are not conservatives. They're vandals.

-- Andrew Sullivan, "The Nullification Party"

Quote of the Day

True, elation sometimes makes its way from a writer's fingertips to his or her heart and, for a moment, the writer believes that he or she has fashioned a chain of perfectly conjoined words.  But the feeling recedes.  Then the sublime seems trite, the harmonious dissonant, and perfection imperfect.

-- Tom Grimes, Mentor, p. 213

Quote of the Day

While the teen pregnancy rate in the United States has been dropping for years (hitting a six-decade low in 2010, according to the research done by the Centers for Disease Control), the United States still has far and away the highest teen pregnancy rates in the industrialized world, and states with abstinence-only sex education have the highest rates of teen pregnancy.

-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 44

Quote of the Day

Writing and face blindness required the same patience, the same commitment to slowness.  They forced a similar kind of willingness to hang out in frustration and ambivalence.  Failure rates were high in both camps.  In both, writing and recognizing, one had to hang back, leave spaces for the truth to emerge in its own time.

-- Heather Sellers, You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know, p. 326

Quote of the Day

Writing on the road is all about butterfly collecting for me.  I'm just grabbing little bits of this and that and adding to my collection.  An overheard snippet of a conversation, a line from an essay or newspaper, something my wife says -- if it resonates I catch it and keep it for later.

-- Linford Detweiler

Quote of the Day

Don't like the shutdown? Send the bill to the evangelicals. People schooled to live in a make-believe magical facts-be-damned world took over the Republican Party. The Tea Party is the pro-life evangelical subculture reborn with a few libertarian nuts thrown in. I'm talking about the bedrock mostly southern and mountain state evangelical conservatives that are anything but conservative. The pro-life, home-school, anti-government far right is the evangelical movement. And it's radically anti American. Without this movement the 40 extremists in congress who are the radical right of the far right would not have been elected.

-- Frank Schaeffer, "Send the Bill for the Shutdown to the Religious Right"

Quote of the Day

I've always wanted to write poems and nothing else.  There were times over the years when life was not easy, but if you're working a few hours a day and you've got a good book to read, and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you're okay.

-- Mary Oliver

Quote of the Day

When ideologies become as calcified, as cocooned and as extremist as those galvanizing the GOP, the American system of government cannot work... This is not about ending Obamacare as such (although that is a preliminary scalp); it is about nullifying this presidency, the way the GOP attempted to nullify the last Democratic presidency by impeachment.

-- Andrew Sullivan, "The Nullification Party"

Quote of the Day

Writing's daily difficulties humble a writer; few writers earn a living from their work; fewer still receive accolades; and, at best, two dozen a century are remembered.  So what compels us to do it: a naive but persistent hope for transcendence through art?

-- Tom Grimes, Mentor, p. 213

Quote of the Day

And studies consistently show that young people who've had abstinence-only sex educations are far likelier to accidentally reproduce than young people who've had comprehensive sex educations.

-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 44

Quote of the Day

Until you can explain a thing clearly to someone else, you don't really know it...

-- Heather Sellers, You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know, p. 320