"Art is my life. Art is not a recreation." ~Jamie Masters

"Stasis is itself criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people."
~Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity

"To sing you must first open your mouth. You must have a pair of lungs, and a little knowledge of music. It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar. The essential thing is to want to sing." ~Henry Miller, Tropics of Cancer

"Who knows?...cream always rises to the top." ~Rosalee Toews (aka Mom) to me, on not giving up

"Over the years I have developed a picture of what a human being living humanely is like. She is a person who understands, values and develops her body, finding it beautiful and useful; a person who is real and is willing to take risks, to be creative, to manifest competence, to change when the situation calls for it, and to find ways to accommodate to what is new and different, keeping that part of the old that is still useful and discarding what is not." ~Virginia Satir

"No safety without risks, and what you risk reveals what you value." ~Jeanette Winterson, The World and Other Places

"It takes a trucker a lot to get out of his truck." ~jG Francis

"...When we grow wiser we learn that the disasters of life are often the genius of the unconscious, forcing our egos into a new experience of the self." ~Robert A. Johnson, We

"Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom." ~Marcel Proust

"There is nothing heavier than compassion." ~Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

"You had sex with her?! Eeeeuuw, she's not cute, Cameron!" ~blond girl to blond boy on a casting couch in Hollywood

"It's like a toilet paper tear with a jalapeño finger." ~Joey Toews, on unpleasant things

"As a writer, I am trying to express those things that are most scary to me, because I am alone with them. Why do I write? It's not that I want people to think I am smart, or even that I am a good writer. I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances.'' ~Jonathan Safran Foer

"Must be the cake I ate for breakfast." ~Jamie Masters, on stomach aches

"when I grow up, I'm gonna be a lady preacher." ~me, age 4

“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no “brief candle” to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.” ~George Bernard Shaw

"When a giraffe wants to do something, it's difficult."
~jG Francis

"You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment." ~Annie Dillard