"I'm really glad our paths have entered the same park." ~Me to Sara Kaye Larson (who is leaving us here in Los Angeles and heading out into the great wide wonderful today - best of luck Miss Sara, not that you need any!)

"Families are about love overcoming emotional torture." 

~Matt Groening

"It takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else." ~Erma Bombeck (thanks Mom)

"Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." ~T.S.Elliot (thanks Michele)

"I have enough money to last me for the rest of my life, unless I buy something." ~Jackie Mason (thanks Chris)

"I need to get another drink. I don't want to be the only sober one." ~Rosalee Dawn, aka Mom

"We are restless beasts, after all, and even paradise becomes too plain a prison."
~Andrew Sean Greer, The Confessions of Max Tivoli

"How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong. Because someday in your life you will have been all of these.”
~George Washington Carver

"Don’t give up! I believe in you all
A person’s a person, no matter how small!
And you very small persons will not have to die
If you make yourselves heard! So come on, now, and TRY!"
~Dr. Seuss, Horton Hears a Who!

"Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better."
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Elephant ears and livestock, where do I sign? Hello, I was in 4-H as a child, what do I have to do, get a tattoo? Of course I want to go to the fair." ~Me to Sara Kaye, via email

"Nothing is foolproof for a sufficiently talented fool."
~Davis Donut's reader board in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho (thanks Dad)

"I probably won't go this weekend. I don't even know that many ACDC songs."

~Girl in a Nordstoms dressing room to her friend, regarding Mama Mia! (thanks Heidi and Sara)

"Go back to school to become a veterinarian. Let's face it, that regional sales meeting really isn't all that important in the scheme of things."
~Jonathan Adler, My Prescriptive for Anti-Depressive Living (thanks Michele)

"Please, please, please say you can fix my hair. It looks like a rare bird took a dump on my head. Possibly the worst haircut since the sixth grade Super Cut days. Save me from my middle school memories."
~Me to Michele, the pro, via email

"Nothing more exhilarating (he wrote) than saving yourself by the simple act of waking."
~Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

"Oh and I don't have a brain tumor. My wrists and hands are numb because I have CARPAL TUNNEL syndrome. Doctor diagnosed. She gave me a slip with some scribbles on it and I took it to CVS and it was for a GROSS fat lady wrist brace - on the package it says "for your active lifestyle" holy shit. SICK I need to travel more instead of sitting here in my house collecting syndromes. My brace's name is FUTURO."
~Sara Kaye Larson, to me via email

"Here is the deepest secret no one knows
Here is the root of the root, the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of the tree called life;
which grows higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide
It's the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

I carry your heart, i carry it in my heart"
~E.E. Cummings (thanks Heather)

"Learn as if you'll live forever
Explain yourself wildly, not carefully
Wake up -- but not too fast, or you might hurt yourself
Question authority, including the authority that told you to question authority
Give me chocolate or I'll scream
It's all so funny -- how can you not be laughing?
When you shout "halaluya," never spell it right
Live the freakiest truth"
~Scrawled on the backpacks and binders of sixth grade girls at Greenwood School in Mill Valley, California

"The longer I live the more I realize I spend less energy trying to control that which I have no control over anyway."
~Ron Toews (aka Dad)

"Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts. And never hope more than you work." ~Rita Mae Brown

"Our true life is when we live in dreams awake."

~Henry David Thoreau (thanks Mom)

"Life is too short not to have a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator and a babka in the freezer."
~Sara Juli (thanks Charlie)

"The forth came and the fireworks exploded and I didn't lose a finger. I'd say the day was a success." ~Yours truly

"Arm goes up, pins go down." ~Christopher Cannon, on his much revered bowling technique

"Each one of you have to find your ninja, your secret warrior, the one that lives in your heart. You have to look inside you at that thing that scares you, because what scares you, is what saves you, every time."

~From the movie, Knights of the South Bronx (thanks Mom)

"We may lose our power before I finish this & that would be a real loss of all my painstaking snail's-pace one-finger pecking, so here goes with some quotes..." Rosalee Toews (aka Mom), via email during a thunderstorm (quotes from her to follow)

"The love of one's country is a splendid things. But why should love stop at the border?"

~Pablo Casals

"Do you know what makes the prison disappear? Every deep, genuine affection. Being friends, being brothers, loving, that is what opens the prison, with supreme power, by some magic force. Without these one stays dead. But whenever affection is revived, there life revives." ~Vincent van Gogh

"Beer is proof that god loves us and wants us to be happy."
~Benjamin Franklin (thanks Craig)

"It is better to live your own destiny imperfectly, than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection."
~Bhagavad Gita (thanks Sara)