"How the hell can I work when the sky's so blue? I damn sure don't work for nothin'. Piss on it I just as soon sit underneath the shade tree."
~Felix, Riding the Rails by Michael Mathers

"Love is in us. It's deeply embedded in the brain. Our challenge is to understand each other." ~Helen Fisher, The brain in love

"Sometimes heroism is nothing more than patience, curiosity, and a refusal to panic."
~Leif Enger, So Brave, Young, and Handsome

"The biggest joy was on the way home. In my cockpit window, every two minutes: The Earth, the Moon, the Sun, and the whole 360-degree panorama of the heavens. And that was a powerful, overwhelming experience. And suddenly I realized that the molecules of my body, and the molecules of the spacecraft, the molecules in the body of my partners, were prototyped, manufactured in some ancient generation of stars. And that was an overwhelming sense of oneness, of connectedness; it wasn't 'Them and Us', it was 'That's me!', that's all of it, it's... it's one thing. And it was accompanied by an ecstacy, a sense of 'Oh my God. Wow. Yes.' An insight. An epiphany. "
~Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14, In the Shadow of the Moon

"Americans... still believe in an America where anything's possible - they just don't think their leaders do."
~Barack Obama

"It's a popular fact that 90 percent of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong...It is used. One of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary, to turn the unusual into the usual. Otherwise, human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing a stupid grin, saying, "Wow," a lot. Part of the brain exists to stop this from happening. It is very efficient, and can make people experience boredom in the middle of marvels."
~Terry Pratchett

"Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds." ~Albert Einstein

"Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can - there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did." ~Sarah Caldwell

"I don't care what the doctors say, my bones are hard."
~An old woman to her old friend over coffee

"You make me love things I used to hate."
~Neighbor Hansen to me, on vegetables and kettle corn

"Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness...

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death."
~David Foster Wallace, Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address - May 21, 2005

"By the way guys... tequila drunk - all I'm gonna wanna do is dance." ~Heidi Fikstad, happy at Malo's happy hour

"With the stones we cast at them, geniuses build new roads for us."~Paul Eldridge

"History does not teach fatalism. There are moments when the will of a handful of free men breaks through determinism and opens up new roads. People get the history they deserve." ~Charles de Gaulle

"What the people want is very simple. They want an America as good as its promise." ~Barbara Jordan

"When you play the cowbell, people listen." ~jG Francis

"If you don't become the ocean, you'll be seasick every day." ~Leonard Cohen

"I'm gonna give her a cookie and a hug and she'll be fine." ~Nanny Jamie Masters, regarding a one-year-old
...
"That's how you keep me quiet for 10 minutes."
~Heidi Fikstad, a 28-year-old

"When seeing a new place, I often think: I am going to come back here later -- when I am rich, or when I have more time, or when I have a purpose, or when I am with someone I love -- and do this right. But it is a self-deception. More often than not, my feet lead me somewhere new rather than somewhere I have already been. And as I sat at that window watching the train bore through the heart of China, I had a different, more probable thought: I'd better remember what this place looks like. I will never be back." ~Brad Newsham

"You can make anything pretty."
~Neighbor Hansen to jG, in the backyard cleaning the BBQ

"It is easy, but not right 2 judge that which we do not understand. Our only job is 2b tru2 ourselves follow our hearts& 2 love& 4give!"
~Rosalee Toews (aka Mom), via text message

"If you're really listening, if you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly."
~Andrew Harvey

"I said, make me dinner!"
~jG Francis to me, after watching too much Mad Men

"Enter each day with the expectation that the happenings of the day may contain a clandestine message addressed to you personally. Expect omens, epiphanies, casual blessings, and teachers who unknowingly speak to your condition." ~Sam Keen

"How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg." ~Abraham Lincoln

"The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future." ~Jessamyn West

"It is good for man
To try all changes, progress and corruption, powers, peace and anguish,
not to go down the dinosaur's way
Until all his capacities have been explored: and it is good for him
To know that his needs and nature are no more changed, in fact, in ten
thousand years than the beaks of eagles."
~Robinson Jeffers

"It is weird that I would eat one of those dudes on a bun."
~jG Francis, passing a pasture of cows in Butte Valley, CA

"I'm coming SOON!" ~Jesus, according to a big billboard off Highway 730 in Irrigon, WA