Quote of the Day

Fortune favors the prepared mind.

-- Louis Pasteur

Quote of the Day

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

-- Voltaire

Quote of the Day

The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.

-- Alice Walker

Quote of the Day

Before this [CD] collection (and the growing arsenal of records in the next room over ...) is inevitably handled down or tubbed up, it will remember the story of my life better than my battered brain ever could on its own.

-- Kris Swales, "Friends mock me for keeping my CDs, but I can't bear to part with these postcards from my past" 

Quote of the Day

Listening to music should be an immersive experience.  Streaming music [on the other hand] is something you mostly do while you're doing something else.

-- Kris Swales, "Friends mock me for keeping my CDs, but I can't bear to part with these postcards from my past"

Quote of the Day

Running my eye across my [CD] collection is like flicking through a shoebox filled with love letters and postcards from my past: the exhilarating highs, the soul-crushing lows, sprinklings of the drudgery in between.

-- Kris Swales, "Friends mock me for keeping my CDs, but I can't bear to part with these postcards from my past"

Quote of the Day

And what, you ask, is a life without wonder?  It is drab and dreary.  It is one of imposed certainty and compulsory routine.  It is devoid of splendor and excitement with a bolted doorway to astonishment.

So what, then, becomes of men's passion and intensity?  It is rerouted early on into dominance, aggression, and competition.

-- Eve Ensler, The Apology, p. 103

Quote of the Day

Implicit in wonder is humility.  To surrender to what is larger and unknown, to that vast, mysterious universe of which you are a tiny dot.

-- Eve Ensler, The Apology, p. 102

Quote of the Day

Curiosity is a form of generosity.  Implicit in it is the recognition of another, requiring the puncturing of the vain inglorious shell of self-importance.

-- Eve Ensler, The Apology, p. 101-102

Quote of the Day

... I knew too well the devastating consequences of not being seen, of disappearing in a family that never expressed any curiosity about who I really was, but determined my identity based on their own projections, fears, and needs.

-- Eve Ensler, The Apology, p. 101

Quote of the Day

I refused to know or see you.  And this in some ways was the most destructive and punishing deprivation.  Isn't that all any us crave, really?  To be known?  To be given shape and form by being recognized and cherished?  For how else can we trust that we are even here?  And perhaps that is why I became so extreme.  Because I was invisible to myself, because I had been erased, I needed to find ways to experience my existence and feel my impact on others.  For what is violence but energy given substance and force?

-- Eve Ensler, The Apology, p. 100

Quote of the Day

An apologist is a traitor of the highest order.  How many men, how many fathers ever admit to failures or offenses?  The act itself is a betrayal of the basic code.  It sprays shrapnel of guilt in all directions.  If one of us is wrong, the whole structure and story come tumbling down.  Our silence is our bond.  The power of not telling, of not letting on, is the most ancient and powerful weapon in our arsenal.

-- Eve Ensler, The Apology, p. 83