Quote of the Day

By thinking that everything is black and white, we sometimes close off the way of grace and growth.

-- Pope Francis, "On Love in the Family"

Quote of the Day

The value of reading contemporary poems, apart from the considerable pleasure of thinking about what they're up to, is that it gets us to focus our attention and sharpen our critical skills, things we need more than ever in an age, like ours, of distraction.

-- Don Share

Quote of the Day

Fortunately, traveling and speaking took me to audiences full of down-home common sense.  When a reporter raised the question of my looks as more important than anything I could possibly have to say, for example, an older woman rose in the audience.  "Don't worry, honey," she said to me comfortingly, "it's important for someone who could play the game -- and win --- to say: 'The game isn't worth shit.'"

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 51

Quote of the Day

You create your life.  You get to shape it, form it, steer it, make it into something.  And you have way more power to do this than you realize.  What you do with your life is fundamentally creative work.  The kind of life you lead, what you do with your time, how you spend your energies -- it's all part of how you create your life.

-- Rob Bell, How to Be Here, p. 11

Quote of the Day

This ability of the body is a source of never-ending wonder to me.  It fights against lies with a tenacity and a shrewdness that are properly astounding.  Moral and religious claims cannot deceive or confuse it.  A little child is force-fed morality.  He accepts this nourishment willingly because he loves his parents, and suffers countless illnesses in his school years.  As an adult he makes use of his superb intellect to fight against conventional morality, possibly becoming a philosopher or a writer in the process. 

-- Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies, p. 117

Quote of the Day

It was hard to blame the [feminist] movement's veterans for backing away from the struggle to fundamentally change what being female might mean.  The front lines could be a punishing, thankless place; those who ventured there were rewarded most often with ridicule, or venom, or worse.  And it hurts to keep losing.  For critiquing domestic roles, feminists were labeled antifamily; for calling out male misbehavior, they were tarred as man haters; for agitating to expand the lexicon of acceptable female appearances, they were caricatured as "someone who is masculine and who doesn't shave her legs and is doing everything she can to deny that she is feminine," as one college senior had described a typical feminist in a 1989 Time magazine article on the subject.

-- Sara Marcus, Girls to the Front, p. 22

Quote of the Day

Nothing can make up for truths untold.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 43

Quote of the Day

David Bowie showed this queer kid from Baton Rouge that gender outlaws are cool.  Androgyny=rock&roll, not a reason to kill myself.
 
-- Mary Gauthier

Quote of the Day

It is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.

-- Brother David Steindl-Rast

Quote of the Day

Do you see your life as something you create?  Or do you see your life as something that is happening to you?

-- Rob Bell, How to Be Here, p. 7

Quote of the Day

Traveler, there is no path, the path must be forged as you walk.

-- Antonio Machado

Quote of the Day

A person once said, "It's true.  Why do I think it would kill my parents if I showed them what I really felt for them?  I have the right to feel what I feel.  It's not a question of retaliation, but of honesty.  Why is honesty upheld as an abstract concept in religious instruction at school but prohibited in the relationship with our parents?"

-- Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies, p. 116-117

Quote of the Day

As I look back on my own life and what Daring Greatly has meant to me, I can honestly say that nothing is as uncomfortable, dangerous, and hurtful as believing that I'm standing on the outside of my life looking in and wondering what it would be like if I had the courage to show up and let myself be seen.

-- Brene Brown, Daring Greatly, p. 249

Quote of the Day

Many of the [Riot Grrrl] movement's core values, I've come to realize, are as necessary now as they were then.  The early '90s were a difficult time to be a woman, especially a young one, and too little has changed in the intervening decades.  Yet nothing else has emerged since then to confront sexism with a fraction of Riot Grrrl's fire and prophetic drive.  The self-righteous absolutism of adolescence eventually softens its edges, as it must.  But we never stop needing that idealism and energy, that courage to name things as political if they are political and unacceptable if they are unacceptable, that dedication to crafting our lives and our communities on our own terms.  Telling stories is just the beginning.

-- Sara Marcus, Girls to the Front, p. 10-11

Quote of the Day

(David Bowie) shattered the binary idea of gender -- as being male or female -- and he created that middle.  He showed us what a man looked like in a dress, and it was beautiful.  There was an inner femininity, but it was masculine, too.

-- Mary Gauthier, "Bowie lauded as an artist who made it OK to be different"

Quote of the Day

If I had to name the most important discovery of my life, it would be the portable community of talking circles; groups that gather with all five senses, and allow consciousness to change.  Following them has given me a road that isn't solitary like my father's, or unsupported like my mother's.  They taught me to talk as well as listen.  They also showed me that writing, which is solitary, is fine company for organizing, which is communal.  It just took me a while to discover that both can happen wherever you are.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 40

Quote of the Day

The fantasy of the good family that Carol conjured for her is hard to resist -- a good family is something we all yearn for, something many of us didn't get.  The desire for it is strong, and the possibility of getting it pulls us like a magnet.  Ultimately, however, I was able to show Jan that if she didn't have the kind of family she wanted by this point in her life, she probably wasn't going to get it.  Carol had painted a beautiful picture for her, but it wasn't real.  You can't write a check for a thousand or a million or 10 million dollars and buy closeness, no matter what blackmailers might insist.

-- Susan Forward with Donna Frazier, Emotional Blackmail, p. 37

Quote of the Day

David Bowie will always hold a special place in the hearts of many LGBT people.  He was a beacon for all those who felt alienated because of their gender identity or sexual orientation, helped many to understand and accept themselves, continually challenged gender norms, and proved that being different is not only OK -- it is something to be proud of.

-- Sarah Kate Ellis, "Bowie lauded as an artist who made it OK to be different"

Quote of the Day

The answer is that we can never do the right thing as long as we are out to please someone else.  We can only be the people we are, and we cannot force our parents to love us.  There are parents who can love only the mask their child wears.  When the child removes that mask, they frequently say ... "All I want is for you to be the way you were before."

-- Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies, p. 115

Quote of the Day

Sometimes the bravest and most important thing you can do is just show up.

-- Brene Brown, Daring Greatly, p. 243

Quote of the Day

I think we're reborn many times in this life.  Thank God, I'm an artist.  I think that's that function of art -- in some ways, it's a form of rebirth.  [You] create, and recreate a world for yourself.  It's what artists do, it's the nature of art, and I think artists are particularly wounded.  The wounded are drawn to the arts.
 
-- Mary Gauthier

Quote of the Day

I felt powerless not because I was weak but because I lived in a society that drained girls of power.  Boys harassed me not because I invited it but because they were taught it was acceptable and saw that no one intervened.

-- Sara Marcus, Girls to the Front, p. 8

Quote of the Day

I had wanted to escape my traveling childhood, yet I was traveling and making the discovery that ordinary people are smart, smart people are ordinary, decisions are best made by the people affected by them, and human beings have an almost infinite capacity for adapting to the expectations around us -- which is both the good and the bad news.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 39

Quote of the Day

If you think all birds look like eagles, you might be shocked when someone tells you the swan that just floated by was a bird, too.

-- Susan Forward with Donna Frazier, Emotional Blackmail, p. 18

Quote of the Day

(Thinking about writing my book is) quite intimidating.  [But] I just show up and do my best.  It's like playing the Opry.  I stood on that stage.  I just went "OK, here we go." ... I've been elevated to the point where it's not certain I can pull this off, but I'll do my best.  There's something guiding me, helping me.  You know, I just feel I got those angel wings on my shoulders.  It's just angels around me.  I felt that way when I played the Newport Folk Festival the first time.  There was some sort of something that had me, going "You got this, we got you.  All together."  It's some sort of something strange, no word for it ... I don't know how to explain it except to say, "I'm not alone up there."

-- Mary Gauthier

Quote of the Day

Sloughing off gratitude and guilt feelings was an extremely important stage on the path to breaking with my dependency on my internalized parents.  But there were other steps that had to be taken as well.  The most important of these was giving up the expectation and the hope that what I missed most sorely in my relations with my parents -- a frank exchange of feelings, the freedom to communicate -- might someday be possible after all ... The expectations originating in childhood can be so strong that we will give up everything that would do us good, in order finally to be the way our parents wanted us to be and thus sustain the illusion of love.

-- Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies, p. 114

Quote of the Day

Hope is a combination of setting goals, having the tenacity and perseverance to pursue them, and believing in our own abilities.

-- Brene Brown, Daring Greatly, p. 240

Quote of the Day

Though I had imagined my life would be that of a journalist and observer, sure that I didn't want to be responsible for the welfare of others as I had been for my mother,  I found myself committed to colleagues and a magazine that made me lie awake at night wondering if we could make the payroll.  Yet this responsibility had become a community, not a burden.

 -- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 39

Quote of the Day

Songs are music and words glued together with magic.  Songwriters apply the glue.
 
-- Mary Gauthier

Quote of the Day

With every step you take to learn and use skills that will disarm your emotional blackmailers, you will be restoring the very core of your being -- your integrity.  That precious wholeness you mourned for was never really lost -- just misplaced.

-- Susan Forward with Donna Frazier, Emotional Blackmail, p. 252