Quote of the Day

Whatever has happened to you, whatever has come your way that you didn't want, whatever you have been through, you have today, you have this moment, you have a life that you get to create.

-- Rob Bell, How to Be Here, p. 31

Quote of the Day

The day I left the Church of Scientology, I became the lowest of their low -- a danger to everyone everywhere.  With a lot of help from my friends, I've recently begun to believe I may not be such an evil fuck after all.  Now I'm trying to reconcile what several religions and subcultures believe to be my evil nature with my heart's desire to be a source of compassion and delight as I walk through the world.

-- Kate Bornstein, A Queer and Pleasant Danger, p. 247

Quote of the Day

I am no longer a child, and my life no longer depends on recognition from "the family."

-- Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies, p. 128

Quote of the Day

Altogether, if I had to pick one place to hang out anywhere, from New York to Cape Town and Australia to Hong Kong, a bookstore would be it.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 52-53

Quote of the Day

I’ve noticed that my best ideas always bubble up when the outside world fails in its primary job of frightening, wounding or entertaining me.

-- Scott Adams

Quote of the Day

Suffering and loss have this extraordinary capacity to alert and awaken us to the gift that life is.

-- Rob Bell, How to Be Here, p. 30

Quote of the Day

Where else could they belong?  Not in their high school, with the arcane codes and social norms that struck Angie [Hart] and her friends as fake and pointless.  And not with their families, where drugs, abuse, and domestic dysfunction often made home feel like one more thing that had to be escaped.  After surveying all the possibilities available to them -- God, sports, drugs and booze, conforming to the culture around them -- they had chosen punk.  Punk made sense to these girls; it was one of the only things that did.

-- Sara Marcus, Girls to the Front, p. 134-135

Quote of the Day

Life's better without secrets.

-- Kate Bornstein, A Queer and Pleasant Danger, p. 200

Quote of the Day

Being bored is a precious thing, a state of mind we should pursue.  Once boredom sets in, our minds begin to wander, looking for something exciting, something interesting to land on.  And that’s where creativity arises.

-- Peter Bregman

Quote of the Day

Whenever I started negotiating with myself, trying to find a compromise, or asking myself whether I should not perhaps divulge only part of the truth, physical symptoms were invariably the response.  I had digestive problems, I could not sleep, and I suffered from bouts of depression.  Once I had realized that there were no more compromises for me, those symptoms disappeared.

-- Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies, p. 128

Quote of the Day

(My 1980s Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions book release and tour) plus two more books and tours in the 1990s made me realize that bookstores were the great community centers.  Anybody could come, whether they could afford a book or not, and the spaces reserved for talks and signings invited talking circles.  Since no computer can provide this companionship, the more personal the store, the more likely it is to survive.

-- Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road, p. 52

Quote of the Day

Every piece of art I've ever made was because I saw bad and could do better, or saw great and needed to catch up.

-- John T. Unger

Quote of the Day

There's a question that you can ask about the things that have come your way that you didn't want.  It's a question rooted in a proper understanding of the world, a question we have to ask ourselves continually throughout our lives: What new and good thing is going to come out of even this?  When you ask this question, you have taken something that was out of your control and reframed it as another opportunity to take part in the ongoing creation of the world.

-- Rob Bell, How to Be Here, p. 21

Quote of the Day

If you're angry or confused or depressed about things that are totally unfair, it is really your reaction that's the problem?

-- Sara Marcus, Girls to the Front, p. 122

Quote of the Day

I’m a big believer in boredom.  Boredom allows one to indulge in curiosity, and out of curiosity comes everything.
 
-- Steve Jobs

Quote of the Day

Once we have learned to live with our feelings and not to fight against them, we see in the manifestations of our bodies not a danger but helpful indications about our own personal history.

-- Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies, p. 126

Quote of the Day

I also came to appreciate this two-way understanding that happens only when we're all in the same space.  It gradually made me less reluctant to go out on my own.  Nervousness might still return, like malaria, but mostly I'd learned that audiences turn into partners if you just listen to them as much as you talk.

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

Quote of the Day

Every time we have built new eyes to observe the universe, our understanding of ourselves and our place in it has been forever altered.

-- Lawrence M. Krauss

Quote of the Day

Who starts cancer foundations?  Usually people who have lost a loved one to cancer.  Who organizes recovery groups?  Mostly people who have struggled with addiction.  Who stands up for the rights of the oppressed?  Often people who have experienced oppression themselves.  We have power, more power than we realize, power to decide that we are going to make something good out of even this...

-- Rob Bell, How to Be Here, p. 21

Quote of the Day

One would never know it by looking at the punk bands that made up the genre's canon in 1990, when Bikini Kill got started -- Black Flag, the Clash, the Sex Pistols, the Ramones -- but the early history of punk rock was full of memorable women, in the United States as well as Britain.  New York had Patti Smith, Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, and post-punk dance bands Y Pants and ESG.  The late-'70s LA scene had been even more gender-balanced: Exene Cervenka of X and Alice Bag of the Bags were magnetic performers, and the Bangles and the Go-Go's cut their teeth in that scene before cleaning up their sound to go mainstream.  Even in Washington, DC, in the early '80s, where the teenage band Minor Threat was seeding the shouty, sinewy, overwhelmingly male hardcore sound, the all-female group Chalk Circle paid tribute to European bands like Kleenex and the Au Pairs.

-- Sara Marcus, Girls to the Front, p. 48-49

Quote of the Day

Children who have been badly treated and have thus never been able to grow up will try all their lives to do justice to the "good sides" of their tormentors and will pin all hopes and expectations to that attempt.

-- Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies, p. 125

Quote of the Day

The trouble is that in order for your book to find its way to the reader in the first place, it needs to be put in front of them.

-- Austin Kleon, "What happened when I used my own journal for a month"

Quote of the Day

If someone called me a lesbian -- in those days all single feminists were assumed to be lesbians -- I learned just to say, "Thank you."  It disclosed nothing, confused the accuser, conveyed solidarity with women who were lesbians, and made the audience laugh.

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

Quote of the Day

Life is too short to help make a world you don't want to live in.

-- Rob Bell, How to Be Here, p. 17

Quote of the Day

The life and the fun of (a writing) project is often in finding the idea.  To "execute" the idea, in some ways, is to kill it.  This process is exacerbated by the delayed gratification of the machinery of publishing.  The book itself is dead, or not dead, but dormant, like Sleeping Beauty: The book is waiting on a reader to crack it open and breathe life into [it], take the words into their eyes and let them dance in their mind.

-- Austin Kleon, "What happened when I used my own journal for a month"

Quote of the Day

Most important, Kathleen [Hanna] knew that feminism could save people's lives.  How could the girls she met on tour possibly fight against what was being done to them if they lost the ability to name it, to analyze it, to see how it was part of a system?

-- Sara Marcus, Girls to the Front, p. 40

Quote of the Day

It does not matter so much whether we have to break off all contact with our parents or not.  The process of separation, the path from childhood to adulthood, takes place inside us.  Sometimes breaking off all contact is the only way in which we can live up to our own needs.  And if contact does appear to make sense, it should be only when we are clear in our minds about what we can take and what we cannot, only after we not only know what happened to us but can also assess what it did to us, what effect it had on us.  Every individual life story is different, and the external form that relationships take can display an infinite range of variations.

-- Alice Miller, The Body Never Lies, p. 124

Quote of the Day

I was just writing all this crazy shit and I thought I was totally insane.  And I got [Kathy Acker's novel] Blood and Guts in High School from one of my photo teachers, and I totally felt like, Oh, I'm not crazy!  It was such a confidence builder for me.  I wasn't even sure what kind of artist I was going to be, like if I was a writer or a photographer or what.  But it made me feel like these other women had done this amazing shit and I could too.

-- Kathleen Hanna