Quote of the Day

I was raised evangelical, which means I spent a good part of my life feeling sorry for the rest of humanity on account of its certain destiny in hell.  This was not something my parents taught me directly, just something I picked up from preachers, Sunday school teachers, and Christian playmates along the way.

-- Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, p. xvi

Quote of the Day

As writers, we each strive for perfection.

-- Tom Grimes, Mentor, p. 207

Quote of the Day

Somewheres in Des Moines or San Antonio there is a young gay person who all of a sudden realizes that she or he is gay.  And that child has several options: staying in the closet; suicide.  And then one day that child might open a paper that says "Homosexual elected in San Francisco" and there are two new options: the option is to go to California, or stay in San Antonio and fight.

-- Harvey Milk

Quote of the Day

The first time I ever heard the word "content" used in its current context, I understood that all my artist friends and I -- henceforth, "content providers" -- were essentially extinct.  This contemptuous coinage is predicated on the assumption that it's the delivery system that matters, relegating what used to be called "art" -- writing, music, film, photography, illustration -- to the status of filler, stuff to stick between banner ads.

-- Tim Kreider, "Slaves of the Internet, Unite!"

Quote of the Day

The process of publishing a book is like telling a joke, then having to wait for 2 years to find out whether it was funny or not.

-- Alain de Botton

Quote of the Day

I expect to pass through this life but once.  Therefore, if there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do for another human being, let me do it now, for I shall not pass this way again.

-- William Penn

Quote of the Day

Only now in 2013, as the full insanity of the far right stand for "God and country" and against government "intrusion" (health care reform proposed by a black man) hits home, the fat cats are being hoisted on their own petard. The religious right's religiously motivated foot soldiers have succeeded in installing forty extremists in Congress who aren't listening to their Wall Street masters any longer and are ready to take us all over the cliff into their imaginary world.

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

Quote of the Day

It simplifies things when we can write-off the thoughts and opinions of other people by assuming they've taken the easy way out, that they're just trying to be popular and liked.  It's oddly affirming to tell ourselves that we're the ones living counter-culturally, we're the ones taking all the risks for the truth, we're the ones getting persecuted for our right and true beliefs.  And it's a bit disconcerting to confront the reality that it's possible to wrestle with the same God and walk with the same limp and yet reach different conclusions.  Perhaps it is in the wrestling itself that we can find some common ground.

-- Rachel Held Evans, "The thing I'd love to forget about the people I disagree with"

Quote of the Day

The writer cocreates the text with the reader.  If a writer gives the reader too much information, the reader feels forced to accept whatever the writer says and eventually stops reading.  If a writer gives the reader too little information, the reader feels compelled to search for whatever the writer says and eventually stops reading.  So, you want to meet the reader halfway.

-- Frank Conroy

Quote of the Day

But you can't know how far you've come if you don't know where you started.  Adult gay men and lesbians don't raise the next generation of gays and lesbians; our history isn't passed from parent to child.  That's why it's critically important for gay men and lesbians, for bisexual and transgender people, to learn their history.  Straight people with LGBT family members, friends, and coworkers should know the history of the LGBT rights movement too.  All straight people should know the story of the gay liberation movement, because it is also the story of straight liberation.  The LGBT rights movement liberated straight people from their prejudices and their fears; it helped straight people see through the goddamn, demeaning bullshit; the movement for LGBT equality helped straight people rebuild relationships with the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender family members and friends that their prejudice had estranged them from.

-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 170-171

Quote of the Day

People who would consider it a bizarre breach of conduct to expect anyone to give them a haircut or a can of soda at no cost will ask you, with a straight face and a clear conscience, whether you wouldn't be willing to write an essay or draw an illustration for them for nothing.

-- Tim Kreider, "Slaves of the Internet, Unite!"

Quote of the Day

I feel like I'm more wired for disruption.  But I tend to think -- as opposed to being a troublemaker -- I only get into trouble I think is worth getting into.  Jesus was a troublemaker.  He sets a pretty good example for us on how to do it in ways that are constructive ...  There are right things to rebel against.  Being a rebel is not a bad thing.  Rebelling against the wrong things is a bad thing.  Rebelling against the right things is a great thing.

-- Derek Webb

Quote of the Day

No one should get an MFA if they have to pay for it...  To me, a writer is someone who writes.  The best thing to me is to read eclectically, to go to readings, to have experiences, to live in the world, to mix with all different types of people, to take some chances, and to find some people and start a writing group.

-- Sarah Schulman

Quote of the Day

In denial of the West's civic-minded, government-supporting heritage, evangelicals (and the rest of the libertarian right) wound up defending private oil companies but not God's creation, private cars instead of public transport, private insurance conglomerates rather than government care of individuals. The price for the religious right's wholesale idolatry of private everything was that Christ's reputation was tied to a cynical political party owned by billionaires. Today it's come to the point where people calling themselves followers of Jesus are fighting AGAINST health care for all!

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

Quote of the Day

If you've abandoned yourself in the effort to keep anyone or anything else, unlearn that pattern. Live your truth, losses be damned. Just like that, your heart and soul will return home.

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

Quote of the Day

(Hitting bottom) puts an end to innocence.  One is violently changed by such trouble.  For most people, a nervous breakdown, whatever the causes, constitutes the most profound event in their lives, creating such deep changes in their understanding of themselves and of the world that they are forced in many ways to begin all over again.

-- Frank Conroy

Quote of the Day

That exchange -- that anger -- led [Merle] Miller to write "What It Means to Be a Homosexual" and to come out in the most public possible way.  The social change we've witnessed over the last forty years was never a given.  Change began when people like Merle Miller decided that they had finally had enough.  Change began when LGBT people began to stand up for themselves and their friends. 

-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 167

Quote of the Day

But I discovered something else in writing this book, something even more graceful and vital than the elusive "perspective."  In all that darkness, there had been love.  What I'd felt all along was not a fantasy, not yet another misinterpretation.  I loved my parents.  I wasn't wrong about that.  And somehow, against all odds, my parents (especially my mother) were able to bring their versions of affection into our world, into our family, as well.

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

Quote of the Day

Somehow, we found the courage to quit trying to scream along with everybody else and just to lean in and whisper something.

-- Linford Detweiler

Quote of the Day

Government was seen as part of God's Plan for creating social justice and defending the common good. Christians were once culture-forming and culture-embracing people. Even the humanism preached by the supposedly "anti-Christian" Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century was, in fact, a Deist/Christian "heresy," with a value system espousing human dignity borrowed wholesale from the Sermon on the Mount.

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

Quote of the Day

There's a real hardship to being quotable, and that's that people tend to remember exactly what you had to say on a subject.

-- Robert Leleux, The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy, p. 214

Quote of the Day

To attract something you want, become as joyful as you think that thing would make you. The joy, not the thing, is the point.

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

Quote of the Day

My psychiatrist claims that whenever I'm not writing I don't know who I am.  But I know exactly who I am.  I'm a writer, and despite my failures, rejections, and minor successes I've never questioned my longing to be a great writer.  Now, I've nearly run out of time and I may never become one.  Yet all along I've known so deeply who I am that, until now, I've been ashamed to admit it, even to myself.

-- Tom Grimes, Mentor, p. 206

Quote of the Day

Being gay isn't a choice.  Remaining closeted all your adult life is.  And it's not a tragedy; it's a moral failing.  It's cowardice.

-- Dan Savage, American Savage, p. 140

Quote of the Day

My own perspective I do feel moved, even obligated, to share.  The discovery that deeply flawed love and deeply flawed vision can coexist has been life-changing for me, and I feel uniquely able to illuminate it.

-- Heather Sellers, You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know, p. 354

Quote of the Day

I think when Karin turned 40, she got her first tattoo. She tattooed a beautiful watercolor of a female hummingbird on her left shoulder with the phrase, "Comparison is the thief of joy." It’s something we like to keep handy because nothing will suck the life out of a creative journey faster than comparing yourself too much to what other people are doing. It’s best just to stay fiercely committed to your own standards of perfection. Stay committed to your own voice.

-- Linford Detweiler

Quote of the Day

What's so curious is that in this religion-inflicted country of ours, the same evangelicals, conservative Roman Catholics, and others who had been running around post-Roe insisting that America had a "Christian foundation" and demanding a "return to our heritage" and/or more recently trashing health care reform as "communist" and demanding the shutdown of the government in order to overturn this "communist" invention by a "non-American" president, ignored the fact that one great contribution of Christianity was a commitment to strong central government. For instance, this included church support for state-funded, or state-church-funded, charities, including hospitals, as early as the fourth century.

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

Quote of the Day

Writing beats baling hay or going door-to-door for a living, but it's still shockingly unenjoyable work.

-- Tim Kreider, "Slaves of the Internet, Unite!"

Quote of the Day

Your rational capacities are far newer and more error-prone than your deeper, "animal" brain. Often complex problems are best solved by thinking like an animal. Consider a choice you have to make -- anything from which movie to see to which house to buy. Instead of weighing pros and cons intellectually, notice your physical response to each option. Pay attention to when your body tenses or relaxes.

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