She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.--Alice Walker, The Color Purple

"There are no monuments dedicated to me and my name will soon be forgotten, but I've loved another with all my heart and soul, and to me, this has always been enough."-Nicholas Sparks, "The Notebook"

"I'd begun to realise that there was an unspoken prejudice among book-learned people, a secret conviction they all seemed to share, that life as we know it is an imperfect vision of reality, and that only art, like a pair of reading glasses, can correct it. The scholars and intellectuals I met at our dinner-table always seemed to hold a grudge against the world. They could never quite reconcile themselves that our lives don't follow the dramatic arc that a good author gives to a great literary character. Only in accidents of pure perfection does the world actually become a stage. And that, they seemed to think, was a shame."
- The Rule of Four, Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason

"Yes," he continued, "that is one of the great secrets of life. Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes."

~Oscar Wilde,The Picture of Dorian Gray

And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act. I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer. But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with that storm, that far-off boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.
-James Baldin, Giovanni's Room

"We are an exceptional model of the human race. We no longer know how to produce food. We no longer can heal ourselves. We no longer raise our young. We have forgotten the names of the stars, fail to notice the phases of the moon. We do not know the plants and they no longer protect us. We tell ourselves we are the most powerful specimens of our kind who have ever lived. But when the lights are off we are helpless. We cannot move without traffic signals. We must attend classes in order to learn by rote numbered steps toward love or how to breast-feed our baby. We justify anything, anything at all by the need to maintain our way of life. And then we go to the doctor and tell the professionals we have no life. We have a simple test for making decisions: our way of life, which we cleverly call our standard of living, must not change except to grow yet more grand. We have a simple reality we live with each and every day: our way of life is killing us."

Blood Orchid by Charles Bowden

Quote from Sexus by Henry Miller
"Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes deperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. there is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there."

"You know the feeling of recognition you get when you look in a mirror? 'That's me,' you think to yourself, 'My hair needs to be combed and, hey, there's a pimple on my nose!' Well I got that same feeling no matter where I looked. I looked at the asphalt road and it was my face. I looked at the bridge and the bridge was me staring back at myself. It was a physical sensation, as if the sky had my eyes and could see me staring up at it. There was no doubt that this state was 'true.' It was far more true than the state I had considered to be normal up until then. I had no need to confirm it with anyone.
It's all me."-Brad Warner, Hardcore Zen

"...There are four kinds of people in this world: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics."

"And that covers everybody?"

"Oh, yes, including us. Or at least me. If you take a good look, everybody fits into one of these categories. Each of us is sometimes a cretin, a fool, a moron, or a lunatic. A normal person is just a reasonable mix of these components, these four ideal types."

Foucault's Pendulum
Umberto Eco

STANLEY: Your looks are okay.
STELLA: I was fishing for a compliment, Stanley.
STANLEY: I don't go in for that stuff.
STELLA: What--stuff?
STANLEY: Compliments to women about their looks. I never met a woman that didn't know if she was good-looking or not without being told, and some of them give themselves credit for more than they've got. I once went out with a doll who said to me, "I am the glamorous type, I am the glamorous type!" I said, "So what?"

-A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams

..And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion or government which limits or destroys the individual.
--John Steinbeck, East of Eden

"Why? Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths? Why does the memory of years of happy marriage turn to gall when our partner is revealed to have had a lover all those years? Because such a situation makes it impossible to be happy? But we were happy! Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it lasts forever? Because things always end painfully if they contained pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain?"

-The Reader, Bernhard Schlink

“Love, desire, and need get all confused and they fight and switch clothes just to fuck with me. But all three burn and ache and when mixed are this dangerous chemical compound that releases poisonous gases from my eyes, clouds of readable smoke, inscribed with all my naked wishes and poetry. And these are the times I want to close my eyes to the world, and these are the times that they are so wide open I scarcely take the time to blink, usually racing from one club, one bed, to another. Love is what makes me keep writing and trying and doing it over and over until I get it right.”
-Thea Hillman, from Depending on the Light

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.”
-Anais Nin, Oct. 27, 19333, from Incest

"Everyone has a moment in his history which belongs particularly to him. It is the moment when his emotions achieve their most powerful sway over him, and afterward when you say to this person 'the world today' or 'life' or 'reality' he will assume you mean this moment, even if it is fifty years past. The world, through his unleashed emotions, imprinted itself upon him, and he carries the stamp of that passing moment forever."-John Knowles, A Separate Peace

“I dreamt that I had learned a way of saving time I didn’t want to spend, and having it to spend when I needed it. Like the time you spend waiting in a doctor’s office, or coming back from someplace you didn’t enjoy going to, or waiting for a bus-- all the little useless spaces. Well, it was a matter of taking them and folding them up, like broken boxes, so that they took up less room. It was really an easy trick, once you knew you could do it. Nobody seemed surprised when I told them I’d learned how; Mother just nodded and
smiled, you know, as though of course everybody learns at a certain age how to do these things. Just break it along the seams; be careful not to lose any; fold it flat.”


John Crowley
Little, Big

"America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but it's people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves.... It is in fact a crime for an american to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.
Kurt Vonnegut "Slaughterhouse Five"

"When I opened my eyes, the window across from us was dark red and I coudl feel that there was not much time left. Outside, the world I had watched for so long was living and breathing on the same earth I now was. But I knew I would not go out. I had taken this time to fall in love instead-- in love with the sort of helplessness I had not felt in death -- the helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human -- feelingas you went, groping in corners and opening your arms to light-- all it part of navigating the unknown." -The Lovely Bones Alice Sebold

Excerpt from "'Jiving' with Your Teen," by Seaton Smith
"Anyone who has observed the youths of American knows they frequently take liberties with the English language in order to flaunt their illiteracy and impress the opposite sex. As a parent, it is vital that you understand their vocabulary - like a cheetah, your teen can sense your confusion and fear. When you master thein vocabulary you can finally tell them, in their own language, that the police at the front door are for them.

Here are a few mandatory words and phrases to use when speaking to your teen:

Dope - A slang word that refers to every teenager's horrific need to associate what he or she considers 'good' with deadly narcotics. When this phrase is uttered, do not panic. Simply reply with: 'Yeah, dog, I got the stash up my cavity.'

It's all good - A shortened term from its original version, 'It's all good when you're employing illegal narcotics and eganing in immoral sexual activity.' Your teen doesn't mean that everything in the world is 'good.' He or she means that everything in the poverty-stricken inner-city ghetto is 'good.'

Cool - One of the most enduring slang terms in American culture. The word "Cool" has seen many forms. As a youth, you probably used the term sensibly: 'Hot dog! It's cool outside, Mabel.' Your teenager uses it in a different context:

'That's Cool.'
Translation: Marijuana is being smoked.

'That is so Cool.'
Translation: A lot of marijuana is being smoked.

'Not Cool.'
Translation: The dog is being smoked."

from The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
translated by Alan B. Clarke

That was what made traveling appeal to [the shepherd boy]--he always made new friends, and he didn't need to spend all of his time with them. When someone sees the same people every day, as had happened with him at the seminary, they wind up becoming a part of that person's life. And then they want the person to change. If someone isn't what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.