Quotes

I've always loved to read. I like to collect quotes from books and websites. It combines two things I love: reading and collecting. Here are some favorites:

Racism

When I interviewed Maya Angelou in 2002, she told me that the September 11 attacks of the previous year were understood differently by African Americans. “Living in a state of terror was new to many white people in America,” she said. “But black people have been living in a state of terror in this country for more than 400 years.” It is that state of terror that has been laid bare these last few years.

The American polity and media episodically “discovers” this daily reality in much the same way that teenagers discover sex – urgently, earnestly, voraciously and carelessly, with great self-indulgence but precious little self-awareness. They have always been aware of it but somehow when confronted with it, it nonetheless takes them by surprise.

Gary Younge, Farewell to America

We are so fucked

The average American likes meat, sports, money, porn, cars, cartoons, and shopping. Less popular: socialism, privilege-checking, and the world ending in 10 years. Ironically, perhaps because of Trump, Democratic Party rhetoric in 2020 is relentlessly negative about the American experience. Every speech is a horror story about synagogue massacres or people dying without insulin or atrocities at the border. Republicans who used to complain about liberals “apologizing for America” were being silly, but 2020 Democrats sound like escapees from the Killing Fields.

Matt Taibbi, Trump 202: Be Very Afraid

Anticipating with dread

The scary thing about drawing near milestones was merely that you weren't there yet. Once you arrived, they turned familiar, you were in the landscape. They could be dealt with.

Darin Strauss, Half a Life

Picking the right person

Tyler Perry says that when we're married, we need to keep in mind the 80/20 rule. Our partner, he says, will give us 80 percent of what we want. When we look at other people, we see only that they have the other 20 percent. Of course, if we ever left our partner, we would again get only 80 percent of what we want, just a different 80 percent -- new joys, new problems. And looking around, we would still see the missing 20 percent in other people.

Ada Calhoun, Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

You will need friends

I tell my medical students to appoint a “board of directors” — three to five people — to guide their decisions on career and life. I also tell them to build at least three communities of friends. The communities can be work, a church, golf buddies, dance friends, etc. If you lose one community from job loss, retirement or divorce, you have others to support you. Also, having large, diverse groups of friends makes life more fun and interesting.

James Horton, 67, How to Live Your Life

You will need mentors

Find life mentors, not just career mentors. Find people who are good at the art of living, the wise ones, and tell them you want them to be available. They do not need to be friends. Then keep in touch, watch them, listen to them, learn from them. Steer clear of people who are paid to do this or imagine themselves to be gurus. Steer clear of anyone with too high opinion of himself or herself, lacking in self-deprecation or a sense of humor. Find the authentic ones who are a bit surprised you picked them out. You need several. I have been lucky enough to find them. They have made all the difference.

Patricia Hunt, 72, How to Live Your Life

Condolences

If someone is having any kind of hard time — death in the family, bad grades, parent arrested, bad publicity, anything, really — you can always say, “I’m thinking about you.” For any loss, you can always say, “I’m sorry for your loss.” Then just listen.

Do not worry that you will remind your friend of their loss; they haven’t forgotten. If you only say these words, you won’t say the wrong thing.

Corlan Johnson, 73, How to Live Your Life

Work and Love

Go on as many first dates and as many job interviews as possible in your life. Both are difficult, learned skills that get dramatically better with familiarity and practice. And no two things have a greater impact on your life outcomes than your work and your love.

Hugh Moore, 39, How to Live Your Life

Get help if you need it

Seek treatment for mental illness early. Years of depression and anxiety rob you of so much personal growth and enjoyment. Ignore how others might judge you for helping yourself through therapy and medication. Don’t suffer for years.

Terri Gwinner, 58, How to Live Your Life

Praise for a Computer Consulant

Nelson owns a computer company. We have an arrangement... in which he provides various services, including virtual handholding, hard-drive voodoo, digital exorcisms, and extended sessions of commiserative tut-tutting. To hear Nelson talk me through computer trouble is to hear an indulgent father reassuring his blubbering, dimwitted toddler that the ankle-biting monsters under the bed are gone bye-bye. I fear the effects our long-term relationship may have on his mental health. Every time I solicit his advice on a new program or piece of hardware, the poor man is forced to execute a reverse drop-shift to dumb-down gear so violent it smokes his intellectual clutch plates. Imagine Einstein forced to explain the theory of relativity to a classroom of second-graders using only a Ping Pong ball, a spoonful of custard, and a bag of lint. Without Nelson, I would be scribing in the dirt with a stick. He is my technosavior.

Population 431

Sexual Harassment

You have this experience that only one other person shared, and you can't talk to that person about it because they're the cause of your pain.

Megan Ganz, Finally

Foreign Perspectives

After college, Wong spent time in Vietnam studying language on a Fulbright scholarship. “It was such a formative part of my life,” she says. “Everyone can tell you that you are a very small part in this world … but you really feel an internalized perspective when you witness this whole society that speaks another language and is operating without any consciousness of your existential crises.”

Ally Wong, Comedy's Reigning Queen Mom

New Tech

In general, when I hear the phrase “There’s an app for that,” my first question is, “Does there need to be?” The vast majority of new technologies are developed with a profit motive. So each new form of tech raises the question: Is this something I’m willing to pay for, whether the cost is in terms of dollars or privacy? Like many people, I chafe at the notion of my personal life being monetized.

Pamela Paul, Sliding Backward on Tech

Learning a New Language

The phrase “learning a language” is deceptively reductive. A language isn’t a singular monolith, but rather a complex interconnected system of components that build a way to communicate. The lexicon consists of the individual words, which speakers have to memorize. The syntax and grammar tell speakers how to properly structure those words in a sentence. Then there’s the writing system, which is the visual representation of words or sounds that allow words to be constructed (for example, in English, the writing system is the alphabet).

Eric Ravenscraft, What You Can and Can't Learn from a Language App

Choosing a political candidate

Electability isn’t a static social fact; it’s a social fact we’re constructing. Part of what will make someone unelectable is people give up on them in a way that would be premature, rather than going to the mat for them.

Kate Manne, Why Female Candidates Get Ruled "Unelectable" So Quickly

Spring

The rites that correspond with this time of year are universal. They transcend era, religion and culture. Above all, the return of the sun means the return of life. It’s more than the unsheathing of one season as a means to get to another. Spring is an alchemic time that animates and invigorates all those who honor it with a sense of vitality and growth.

Jenna Wortham, You're Still Here

Chemotherapy

She told me that people who drank a good bit of alcohol found chemo easier, since chemo was, like alcohol, a sort of distilled liquid with a poisonous edge that could change your mood and cause you aches and pains and generally damage your system. The more alcohol you had drunk in your lifetime, the less shock chemo would be to your system.

Colm Toibin, Instead of shaking all over, I read the newspapers, I listened to the radio, I had my lunch

Liars

One lie, one broken promise, or a single neglected responsibility may be a misunderstanding instead. Two may involve a serious mistake. But three lies says you’re dealing with a liar, and deceit is the linchpin of conscienceless behavior.

Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door

Getting Some

Sometimes, you’re like, ‘Whoever want it, come and get it,’” Ms. Haddish said. “But nobody wants you when you’re like, ‘ANYBODY?’

Tiffany Haddish, My Career is a Delicious Roasted Chicken

Blogging

For all the fisking and venting and social grooming and general chatter, I think that core feeling of “I love this! Why don’t you find something you love this much too?” is what propelled blogging from the beginning. It’s an enthusiast art, and it’s a folk art, from a country known for turning its enthusiast folk art into global industries.

Tim Carmody, Love Letters and Time Machines

Diversity

For the best talent, cast the net wide and don’t ignore any of the available pools.

Frank Bruni, Too Many Wonderful Women to Count

Donald Trump

But he could so easily have been talking about a man with small paws and a yanking handshake, propped up in a seat of power where he telegraphs all his fears and insecurities, reveals over and over his apparently depthless capacity for wounded despair.

Suzannah Showler, Make America Swole Again

Trump...is a singularly effective, intuitive creator of a limitless loop of grievance and discontent that keeps them in absolute lockstep.

Michael Kruse, Johnstown Never Believed Trump Would Help. They Still Love Him Anyway.

Pain

Pain is knowledge rushing in to fill a gap. When you stub your toe on the foot of the bed, that was a gap in knowledge, and the pain is a lot of information, really quick.

Jerry Seinfeld, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee with Trevor Noah

Listening Techniques

...Some of his interviewees have mistakenly believed he (John McPhee) is thick-witted. At times his speech slows, his brow knits, he asks the same question over and over. When repeating answers, he so garbles them that a new answer must be provided. ...Informants... talk more freely and fully to him than they normally would to a reporter. Informants may be timid or hostile, unless they feel superior or equal to their interviewer. By repeating and even fumbling their answers, McPhee encourages people to embroider a topic until he has it entire.

The John McPhee reader

Mistakes, Consquences of

Smart, conscientious people hate making mistakes. Not just because of ego. Because mistakes of a certain type have the kind of consequences that poeple with consciences don't like to live with.

Lee Child, The Affair

Our actions matter

(Ursula LeGuin) is passionate about individual autonomy in the midst of a complex world: what we do, not in isolation, but among all the other business of the day.

John Plotz, LeGuin's Anarchist Aesthetics

On Mental Barriers

I’m sorry, that sounds difficult. But I can’t help you with your emotional problem. I’m here to solve your other problems, you know. Therapy and meds have really gone a long way to helping me accept the things I didn’t want to accept about the world.

Jessamyn West

Talking About the Weather

I’ve never understood why people make fun of talking about the weather. It is of perennial consequence and thus never not interesting.

Charles Comey

On Body Image

I just remind myself that literally nobody cares if I look good or not except for me, and assholes.

Julieanne Smolinski

On Dislocation

There is a part of the brain called the hippocampus that is shaped just like a seahorse. It is in many ways still an unconquered mystery, but it is believed to act as an internal sat-nav. It provides a crossroads between memory and the processing of location, and not just locations of geography and place – although it does deal in those, contextualising landmark objects and images to understand landscapes, interiors and scenes – but also the mapping of an emotional geography such as future goals and aspirations and how to reach them, or memory sequences, or the systemisation of our own personal narratives. It is how we understand where we are and how we put ourselves into the points of view of others. Depression has been found to have a dampening and distorting effect on the hippocampus, so that we become, in many layers of the word, lost.

Suzanne Joinson

On Programmers

As a class, programmers are easily bored, love novelty, and are obsessed with various forms of productivity enhancement. God help you if you’re ever caught in the middle of a conversation about nutrition; standing desks; the best keyboards; the optimal screen position and distance; whether to use a plain text editor or a large, complex development environment; chair placement; the best music to code to; the best headphones; whether headphone amplifiers actually enhance listening; whether open-plan offices are better than individual or shared offices; the best bug-tracking software; the best programming methodology; the right way to indent code and the proper placement of semicolons; or, of course, which language is better. And whatever you do, never, ever ask a developer about productivity software.

Paul Ford

Computers, Robots, Cars

Machines are not rivals or friends: they are tools.

David Ferrucci

Motivation

Don’t make it about the money. When you make it not about the money the benefits never stop since money is only a tiny byproduct of the reasons we live, we do things, we strive for success.

James Altucher

Trying Recipes

She lives by two rules related to cooking. The first is to play it as it lays during a trial run, so you can isolate what went wrong or right when you start improvising later. The second is to add more of what you like and less of what you do not like to things. She’s the first to say when something didn’t pan out. “This is not good,” she’ll say. Other people will say this to fish for a compliment, but she’s crowdsourcing, trying to figure out if the problem is one of technique or ingredients. We’ll workshop it a little, suggesting smoked paprika instead, or a pasta shape that might hold the sauce better. A week or two later, the same dish will grace the table once again, and this time, it’s met with silence, every mouth occupied by shoveling in as much of it as possible.

Kirsten Schofield

Self-Perception

(Author Judy) Blume likes the idea that everybody has an age that defines them for life. For her, she said, that age is 12.

Susan Dominus

Fundamentalism

On a literal level, almost nothing in the Bible or Qu’ran or Torah makes logical sense in today’s world and one must constantly indulge in metaphors and allegories to find any reasonable meaning in them. All traditional social orders have evolved and changed, and science has shown the adaptability of almost every facet of life based on the environment.

It’s understandable why people choose to adopt imperturbable beliefs: it’s the only asset they feel they have.

What we care about

To Berlyne’s ideas of surprise and incongruity, Loewenstein and Golman added importance, salience, and epiphany. Our curiosity is strongest, they found, when we have the chance to resolve uncertainty about something that is personally relevant to us, that demands our attention, and that has the greatest potential to lead to broader insight.

Maria Konnikova, How Long Does It Take to Get to Tatooine?

Relationships

I believe we're all secretly happy we can't figure our relationships out. It keeps our minds working. I think we have to be grateful for the one thing in our lives that keeps us from being totally focused on eating.

Jerry Seinfeld

No one on the outside of a relationship can ever really tell how well it works, or why, or what its stamina ultimately means. Sometimes the two people on the inside don’t even know.

Frank Bruni

Work

For some, working at a mad pace at jobs we profess to love is a way to keep our distance from our hearts and homes. For me, my job loss booted my butt down the path of a different, better way of life.

Maria Stuart

I think that America will have an underclass of smart, sophisticated, intelligent people who got shit on by the megacorporations. Maybe one day we'll rise up and take back this country from the rich and cruel. In the meantime, we're learning to love life again.

http://open.salon.com/blog/maria_stuart/2009/10/19/life_after_newspapers...

Love

Rabbi Wolpe said when I interviewed him, "This notion of soul mates is a nice one to believe in, but in truth, we could be happy with a lot of different people. It's not that there's one soul mate out there -- it's that our soul develops differently with each person."

http://salon.com/books/nonfiction/index.html?story=/mwt/excerpt/2010/02/...

Love is the ability and willingness to allow those that you care for to be what they choose for themselves, without any insistence that they satisfy you.

Dr. Wayne Dyer, from Lee Marshall

Politics

If you look at history, Lyndon Johnson passed the most far-reaching civil-rights legislation since Reconstruction and yet he wasn’t part of the black freedom movement. Roosevelt passed the most far-reaching labor legislation, and yet he wasn’t part of the labor movement. Nor was Lincoln part of an abolitionist party. Those three are remembered for great things because of power from below.

What I’m interested in is organizing in the places we have power: the neighborhood, the classroom, the workplace. I’m less interested in wondering if power will give us what we need. I tend to think power will never give us what we need, unless we demand it.

Bill Ayers

Education

(He) left with the abiding feeling of having been wonderfully well taught -- with that nourishing memory of great teachers that, if we are lucky, we can carry with us for the rest of our lives.”

Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman Rushdie

Destiny

At any rate, he took the leap, and the forking paths of time bifurcated at his feet. He took the westward road and ceased to be who he might have been if he had stayed at home.