:: QUOTE-A-DAY

"Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be."

- Kurt Vonnegut

"It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone."

- Nick Hornby, How To Be Good

"There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. Heaven only knows why we love it so."

- Michael Cunningham, The Hours

"The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled."

- John Berger, Ways of Seeing

"Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste."

- Nikki Giovanni

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."

- Pablo Picasso

"The great stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover's skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don't. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won't. In the great stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn't. And yet you want to know again."

- Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

"Wisely and slow. They stumble that run fast."

- William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

"Every increase in your knowledge is a simultaneous decrease. You learn and you unlearn at the same time. A new certainty is a new doubt as well."

- Brian Eno

"I'd like to quit thinking of the present -- like right now -- as some minor, insignificant preamble to something else."

- Dazed & Confused

"To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children;
To find the best in others;
To appreciate beauty;
To leave the world a bit better
whether by a healthy child,
a garden patch,
or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed easier
because you have lived;
This is to have succeeded."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson