If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that. - Stephen King
A walk through the oceans of most souls will scarcely get your feet wet. (Deteriorata - National Lampoon)
Education is something which should be apart from the necessities of earning a living, not a tool therefor. It needs contemplation, fallow periods, the measured and guided study of the history of man's reiteration of the most agonizing question of all: Why? - John D. MacDonald
"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen." - John Steinbeck
"The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war." - Douglas MacArthur
"Sometimes we need to make side trips - side trips into experiences, emotions, situations that take us off center and somewhere new. Sometimes that's where our greatest learning and growth occur. If a side trip is beckoning, perhaps there's a lesson there: an old feeling to be felt, healed and cleared; a new attitude or belief to be acquired; a revelation, a surprise. Remember this: a side trip, with all it's emotions, isn't about another person. It's about you and your journey to healing, freedom and joy. Ignoring a situation that can take you off center won't take you to the next place. Going more deeply into your own growth process, going more deeply into you soul is what will further your journey. Everything that happens to you can be used, felt, shaped and transformed to further your journey. This process of growth, of side trips and healing, is your destiny, the magical journey of your soul. To get to the next place, we need to leave the comfortable main road we've been traveling. Sometimes a side trip is exactly what we need to make." - Melody Beattie "It takes courage to be willing to stand still and feel what we must feel. Sometimes, we have what seems like endless layers of pain inside us. Pain hurts. Grief hurts. Sadness hurts. It does not feel good. But neither does denying what is already there; neither does living a lifetime with old and new pockets of pain packed, stored, and stacked within. Go with the flow, even when the flow takes us through uncomfortable feelings. Release, freedom, healing, and good feelings are on the other side." - Melody Beattie "If you want to follow me to freedom, be prepared to swim upstream, against the river of conditioning. Be prepared to grapple continuously with the fierce flow of negative mental currents. In time our strokes will become effortless and our sense of purpose irresistible." - Buddha "Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside ourselves will affect us." - Stephen R. Covey "Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground." - Frederick Douglass "Ultimately we know deeply that the other side of every fear is a freedom." - Marilyn Ferguson "The last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." - Viktor E. Frankl "The outward freedom that we shall attain will only be in exact proportion to the inward freedom to which we may have grown at a given moment. And if this is a correct view of freedom, our chief energy must be concentrated on achieving reform from within." - Gandhi "If people base their identity on identifying with authority, then freedom causes anxiety. They must then conceal the victim in themselves by resorting to violence against others." - Arno Gruen "We must strive for freedom if we strive for self-knowledge. The task of self-knowledge and of further self-development is of such importance and seriousness, it demands such intensity of effort, that to attempt it any old way and amongst other things is impossible. The person who undertakes this task must put it first in his life, which is not so long that he can afford to squander it on trifles." - George Gurdjieff "Choosing to live your life by your own choice is the greatest freedom you will ever have." - Shad Helmstetter "We don't get through human life without problems that appear unsolvable. It may be a diagnosis, it may be a downsizing, it may be rejection or betrayal, or even surrendering a freedom we had, such as being unable to drive anymore. But even as some problems lie beyond our own capacity, we grow in other ways. By lifting out of ordinary thinking, we discover something extraordinary in ourselves." - Mary Manin Morrissey "By attempting to avoid the responsibility for our own behavior, we are giving away our power to some other individual or organization. In this way, millions daily attempt to escape from freedom." - M. Scott Peck
Except for tattoos. If you've subscribed to John Waters' advice above, reading each others' tatoos would be nothing but trouble.
A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit. - David Sedaris
"It seems as though the second half of a man's life is usually made up of nothing but the habits accumulated in the first half." (Fyodor D)
"Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie, comes to such a pass that he cant distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and others. And having no respect he ceases to love. " (Brothers Karamazov)
Mainly Fyodor. I think someone pointed out the main difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is the former is more panoramic, more sociological whilst Fyodor is more psychological. Is that right? Fyodor is my fave writer anyway. Christianity might have something to do with it.
