Nick Cave

I've met some of the finest individuals from across the political spectrum. In fact, I take pride and immense pleasure in having friends with divergent views. My life is significantly more interesting and colourful with them in it.  

Perhaps this all amounts to very little, but I suppose, in the end, I value deeds over words. I see my own role as a musician, songwriter, and letter writer as actively serving the soul of the world, and I've come to understand that this is the position that I must adopt in order to attempt to cultivate genuine change. In fact, I am now beginning to understand where I do stand, Alistair - I stand with the world, in its goodness and beauty. In these hysterical, monochromatic, embattled times, I call to its soul, the way musicians can, to its grieving and broken nature, to its misplaced meaning, to its fragile and flickering spirit. I sing to it, praise it, encourage it, and strive to improve it - in adoration, reconciliation, and leaping faith. 

Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files #337 September 2025

Just keep swimming

The mental health benefits of swimming are undeniable. Not only does swimming offer a refreshing break from the stresses of daily life, but it also provides a unique environment for mindfulness and relaxation. The rhythmic movements, combined with the soothing sensation of water, can help alleviate anxiety, improve mood, and promote overall well-being. Whether it’s the sense of freedom in the water or the release of endorphins during exercise, swimming offers a holistic approach to mental wellness. So, next time you’re feeling overwhelmed or in need of a mental boost, consider taking a dip in the pool – your mind will thank you for it. source

Adulthood

 “Besides, adulthood is never something girls grow into. It is something they have thrust upon them, menstruation being only the first of many two-edged swords subsumed under the rubric “becoming a woman,” all of them occasions to stay home from school and weep.”
― Nell Zink, Mislaid

Nell Zink: Why shouldn’t loving puppets be a revolutionary act, in a world where so many people love drone warfare?

 ― Nell Zink, Nicotine 

Everybody has something

The phonetic Armenian phrase for ah-men mard, pan meh oo-nee. The phrase means "Every person has their own burden" or "Everyone has their own trouble".

Breakdown of the phrase

• Amen mart (ah-men mard): Literally translates to "every person" or "everybody".
• Pan meh (pan meh): Refers to "a thing," but in this context, it implies a burden or trouble.
• Oonee (oo-nee): Means "has". 

Water is denser than air, meaning your body must work hard to move through it.

Article

Filtrum, Pertrichor & Kerning

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philtrum#Function

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrichor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerning 

Walking Home From the Library

I was walking home from the library with my dog Romeo. A toothless blonde-haired lady on the opposite side of Clinton Street, in front of the Thundermist Health Center, was waving a package containing two foot-long Slim Jims of beef jerky at me. When I crossed the street she said, "Here, this is for your dog, and if you see a pug you can give it some."

I thanked her and graciously accepted the gift. But as I continued on, I wondered, was she expecting me to see a pug? Was she suggesting that I should only share with a pug? I never did come across a pug.

Nonetheless I was reminded of one of my favorite quotes by Ram Dass: Treat everyone you meet like God in drag.

Learning by Doing by Howard Nemerov

They're taking down a tree at the front door,
The power saw is snarling at some nerves,
Whining at others. Now and then it grunts,
And sawdust falls like snow or a drift of seeds. 

Rotten, they tell us, at the fork, and one
Big wind would bring it down. So what they do
They do, as usual, to do us good.
Whatever cannot carry its own weight
Has got to go, and so on; you expect
To hear them talking next about survival
And the values of a free society.
For in the explanations people give
On these occasions there is generally some
Mean-spirited moral point, and everyone
Privately wonders if his neighbors plan
To saw him up before he falls on them.

Maybe a hundred years in sun and shower
Dismantled in a morning and let down
Out of itself a finger at a time
And then an arm, and so down to the trunk,
Until there's nothing left to hold on to
Or snub the splintery holding rope around,
And where those big green divagations were
So loftily with shadows interleaved
The absent-minded blue rains in on us.
Now that they've got it sectioned on the ground

It looks as though somebody made a plain
Error in diagnosis, for the wood
Looks sweet and sound throughout. You couldn't know,
Of course, until you took it down. That's what
Experts are for, and these experts stand round
The giant pieces of tree as though expecting
An instruction booklet from the factory
Before they try to put it back together.

Anyhow, there it isn't, on the ground.
Next come the tractor and the crowbar crew
To extirpate what's left and fill the grave.
Maybe tomorrow grass seed will be sown.
There's some mean-spirited moral point in that
As well: you learn to bury your mistakes,
Though for a while at dusk the darkening air
Will be with many shadows interleaved,
And pierced with a bewilderment of birds.

the secret is not to panic if it doesn't come

The only thing I've got better at as the years have gone by is I've grown more resigned to the fact that it comes hard. You realize that hesitation and frustration and waiting are part of the process, and you don't panic. I get a lot better at not panicking. I get up every morning early if it's a writing day and I will do nothing else but write that day. But the secret is not to panic if it doesn't come.

Clive James 

“Translated ‘Non omnia possumus omnus’ as ‘No possums allowed on the omnibus.”

 ― Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog 

The meaning of NON OMNIA POSSUMUS OMNES is we all are not capable of all things : we can't all of us do everything. 

AMAZING Sourdough Rye Bran Muffin Waffles

assemble WET ingredients

2 large eggs beaten

1½ to 2 cups sourdough dark rye starter 

⅔ cup lowfat buttermilk

1⁄3 cup corn oil

½ cup  of Grandma's regular molasses 

 assemble DRY ingredients

2 ½ cups wheat bran

1 cup whole wheat flour 

2 ½  teaspoons baking soda

½ teaspoon salt  

*** COMBINE WET & DRY ingredients.

I use a waffle iron and they bake in 3 to 4 minutes! Enjoy the waffle with Greek yogurt on top. And a delicious cup of coffee.

I originally found the bran muffin recipe through Marion Cunningham's BREAKFAST BOOK but then I discovered using some of my sourdough rye starter and I've never looked back. Dark RYE sourdough starter is always alive and happy within a very short time of being refreshed. This is exciting to me, the impatient chef, and it's also a solution to ways you can use your bubbling active starter.

Quick Sauce for Homemade Sourdough Rye Semolina Pizza Dough

I took  a whole garlic bulb smashed the cloves, peeled them and chopped them with salt sprinkled on top. I added the raw garlic to the frying pan and added olive oil. Then I added a head of freshly chopped broccoli, some freshly-sliced mushrooms, 1 chopped a green bell pepper, I sliced one large red onion,  I added 1 can black olives chopped, I added 1 big can of crushed tomatoes, a handful of fresh basil & a bloop of Chianti.

It turned out to be an amazing sauce that was so good I kept taking bites of it. It would be excellent on pasta too. I made a dough for pizza a few hours earlier and added the sauce with freshly grated cheese on top.

The pizza dough was semolina sourdough rye with whole wheat flour and some bread flour, salt and instant yeast and olive oil. I mixed it up and let it rise a few hours. Then I spread some of the dough into an oiled cast iron frying pan using it as my baking stone. I added the sauce and freshly grated cheese (Asiago and Cheddar) and baked it in my preheated oven at 450 degrees 8-12 minutes. My husband and I ate the whole pizza. (The size was an 11 3⁄4 inch round skillet).

Puddle Puzzle: A Mystery

At 1:00 AM I woke up and there was an oblong puddle on the bathroom floor. I checked and it was not a leak from plumbing, or the open window, the dog or a human. I cleaned it up. It's truly a mystery.

The real danger isn’t Tylenol, it’s bad information The T**** administration’s claims about Tylenol and autism — and the weak science used to support them — must be called out for what they are: reckless, disappointing, and dangerous.

 Leaders should build trust, not erode it; clarify uncertainty, not exploit it. On Tylenol and autism, one thing is clear: There is no credible evidence that the former causes the latter. What we do know is that fear and misinformation can cause real harm. That is why these claims — and the weak science used to support them — must be called out for what they are: reckless, disappointing, and dangerous. Dr. Ashish K. Jha is dean of Brown University School of Public Health and a contributing Globe Opinion writer.

article

Suppose within each book there is another book

 “Suppose within each book there is another book, and within every letter on every page another volume constantly unfolding; but these volumes take no space on the desk. Suppose knowledge could be reduced to a quintessence, held within a picture, a sign, held within a place which is no place. Suppose the human skull were to become capacious, spaces opening inside it, humming chambers like beehives.”
― Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall 

Truth can break the gates down, truth can howl in the street; unless truth is pleasing, personable and easy to like, she is condemned to stay whimpering at the back door.

  ― Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies 

You can be merry with the king, you can share a joke with him. But as Thomas More used to say, it's like sporting with a tamed lion. You tousle its mane and pull its ears, but all the time you're thinking, those claws, those claws, those claws.

  ― Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies 

The word 'however' is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.

 ― Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies 

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.

 ― Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies 

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall: When you are writing laws you are testing words to find their utmost power. Like spells, they have to make things happen in the real world, and like spells, they only work if people believe in them.

Flannery O'Connor: The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

Flannery O' Connor: If there is no possibility for change in a character, we have no interest in him.

H.L. Mencken: Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

H.L. Mencken: Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

“Civilization, in fact, grows more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. They are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury.”

― H.L. Mencken, In Defense of Women

“The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.”

― H.L. Mencken

H.L. Mencken: I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.

A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it. Roald Dahl

“Do you know what breakfast cereal is made of? It's made of all those little curly wooden shavings you find in pencil sharpeners!”

― Roald Dahl

“I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. He taught me that if you are interested in something, no matter what it is, go at it at full speed ahead. Embrace it with both arms, hug it, love it and above all become passionate about it. Lukewarm is no good. Hot is no good either. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.”

― Roald Dahl, My Uncle Oswald

Grown ups are complicated creatures, full of quirks and secrets. Roald Dahl

I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn't be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage. Roald Dahl

 “So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: You are not alone.”

― Roald Dahl, Matilda

 

“The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She traveled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.” 

― Roald Dahl, Matilda

 “If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”
― Roald Dahl, The Twits

fill the shelves with lots of books

“So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,
Go throw your TV set away,
And in its place you can install
A lovely bookshelf on the wall.
Then fill the shelves with lots of books.”
― Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it. Roald Dahl

Machete

The other day I was surprised to discover a machete in my shrubs. It was rusty and the handle was reinforced with black duct tape. I presume it had been there for many years but when the neighbor trimmed the bushes overlapping his property, this was inside. I quickly took it before the neighborhood gang of six-year-olds found it. My husband and I stashed it in the car and Sunday morning. On our way home from our walk, we drove to the red-wheeled dumpster on Pritzer Street and dropped it in. Clang. It fell to the bottom. I felt relieved.

George Orwell: Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

From infancy on, we are all spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few. John Updike

When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. John Updike

The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. John Updike

Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them. John Updike

John Updike: I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody's head.

  ― John Updike, Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism 

Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.

 ― John Updike, Rabbit, Run 

John Updike: I'm willing to show good taste, if I can, in somebody else's living room, but our reading life is too short for a writer to be in any way polite. Since his words enter into another's brain in silence and intimacy, he should be as honest and explicit as we are with ourselves.

Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more.

 John Updike

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

John Updike   

John Updike: Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey.

John Updike: The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.

John Updike: Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.

Remember, somewhere the sun is shining

“Look for the Silver Lining” is a popular song with music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by B.G. DeSylva. It was written in 1919 for the unsuccessful musical Zip, Goes a Million. In 1920 it was published[1] and reused in the musical Sally whence it was popularized by Marilyn Miller. Among others, the song was later covered several times by Judy Garland, whose version also became, and remains, well-known.

When taken into context with the rest of the album, full of heartbreak and melancholy, it almost seems like the sun has come back to us, telling us to look for the silver lining in a rainy album.

 [Verse:] 

Look for the silver lining 

Whenever a cloud appears in the blue

Remember, somewhere the sun is shining

And so the right thing to do is make it shine for you  

 

A heart, full of joy and gladness 

Will always banish sadness and strife 

So always look for the silver lining 

And try to find the sunny side of life 

 

 A heart, full of joy and gladness

 Will always banish sadness and strife

 So always look for the silver lining

 And try to find the sunny side of life

Bus Stop

This morning at the bus stop on the side of E.A. Marcoux sheet metal, five people were waiting. When bus 54 arrived, one woman was left behind. She was sitting on the curb in front of the vacant store front. She was wearing a brown knit cap. I was 50 yards away standing, watching with my dog, Romeo. Moments later I heard sirens and a red ambulance and red fire truck stopped at the bus stop. The EMT's jumped out and placed the woman on a stretcher and carried her into the back of the ambulance, and drove off. 

looking on the bright side

Byrne’s dedication to looking on the bright side includes his digital news outlet Reasons to be Cheerful A recent post celebrated a Boston cargo bike share.

“In some ways, things are not good at all, and there’s a lot to be concerned about,” he said. “But it is also true that we’ve evolved to be attracted to negative news more than anything positive.”

“Our readership is up, our memberships are up,” he added. “People actually need that kind of news more than they ever did.” 

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/24/arts/david-byrne-ghost-train-orchestra/

https://reasonstobecheerful.world/ 

Sue Coe interview

I want to ask you one last question. Why are animals important?

I think it’s like looking at all the stars—if you look at that, and you look at all the universes, and the universes in the universes, and the spiral of the arm of the galaxy we’re on, and then you look at all the creatures and all the variety, you see that it almost melts the brain—the beauty of all these creatures, and all these forms, and all these rocks, and air. Everything about the earth is beautiful, it’s so beautiful. Every speck of starlight, every speck of stardust that makes plants and makes ants and makes worms and makes whales—it’s such a gift to even be alive here to see this.

It’s awe, and I feel awed every time I see my dogs looking at me—and they’re not my dogs, they’re just dog creatures, dog persons—and I realize what communication we have, or what communication we all have with each other. It seems like it’s some kind of paradise. And so to see that being hurt—it’s just like the worst wound in your soul that you can imagine, to see that being hurt. And once you start to see the hurt, it becomes almost unbearable. You see so much hurt of all this beauty. And then you realize about human hubris—that the oceans are turning acid, but acid creatures will form long after we’ve gone. Life will move on again.

And this is some gift we’ve been given, you know. I think the reason we’re here is just to protect it a bit. Protect it slightly, and be protected as well. Because if we look at the animals we share our lives with, how protective they are, how amazing they are . . .

That’s what it means to me—it means we’re the luckiest creatures, because we’re born on this planet, Planet Ocean. To see all this—to see the sparkle of it all—to know it’ll continue on, no matter what, in different forms. I wish everyone felt that way. Maybe we all have the potential to feel that way. But certainly, the murder of other beings isn’t helping anyone.

Sue Coe: one of the hardest, most horrible things about oil painting is that you have to stretch fucking canvasses that follow you around like sailboats or something.

 https://bombmagazine.org/articles/2012/08/02/drawing-attention-sue-coe/

Jennifer Egan: In a way, I'm always trying to do something I'm not qualified to do. So I feel that lack of qualification. And I'm scared. And I have a tendency to think things may not/probably won't work out. That's my basic mindset.

I think the one thing that's changed over time is that I've come to realize, as a fiction writer, the fact that I don't think it will work out, doesn't mean that it actually won't.

I don't really know where my ideas come from. I start with a time and a place. That's what I need to get started, and an intellectual question.

The bottom line is that I like my first drafts to be blind, unconscious, messy efforts; that's what gets me the best material. 

That adage about 'Write what you know' is basically the opposite of the way I function. I write about what I'm curious to find out.

Writing feels natural to me; the act of it seems to free up my unconscious, so that sometimes I feel that I have access to more ideas and information than my conscious mind could think up. 

We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There's simply no way to write well, though, if you're not reading well.

I find myself thinking more about the past as I get older... maybe because there's just more of it to think about. At the same time, I'm less haunted by it than I was as a younger person. I guess that's probably the ideal: to reach a point where you have access to all of your memories, but you don't feel victimized by them. 

Because you can't write habitually and well all the time, you have to be willing to write badly. That's how you get the regularity that enables you to be present for the good stuff.

I think there are ways in which we censor ourselves; that's the most dangerous kind of censorship - that's how hegemony works.

JENNIFER EGAN  

Jennifer Egan: I write totally spontaneously. I actually write fiction by hand - that always seems to startle people. I think the reason I do that is to bypass the thinking part of me and get to the more unconscious part, which is where all the good ideas seem to be.

Jennifer Egan: Exercising is a good analogy for writing. If you’re not used to exercising you want to avoid it forever. If you’re used to it, it feels uncomfortable and strange not to. No matter where you are in your writing career, the same is true for writing. Even fifteen minutes a day will keep you in the habit.

George Orwell: If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

George Orwell: If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.

George Orwell: The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

George Orwell: In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

The Reminder Frog

I have a tiny rubber frog inside a tiny wooden bowl. I call it my reminder frog. It lives next to the teapot but I move it to the kitchen counter to remind me of something. It could be to remember that I am washing my clothes and will need to hang them up soon, or that I have a window open, or that my dog is in the backyard.

I've never had a good short term memory so I have scraps of notes all over the place to remind me of things. I also have multiple kitchen timers including two on the stove and one I can wear because I can get distracted.

One day in winter I walked my dog holding my huge mechanical white plastic kitchen timer to remind me not to linger too long to chat if I ran into anyone because I was simultaneously baking bread. 

In my experience, there is only one motivation, and that is desire. No reasons or principle contain it or stand against it. Jane Smiley

A child who is protected from all controversial ideas is as vulnerable as a child who is protected from every germ. The infection, when it comes- and it will come- may overwhelm the system, be it the immune system or the belief system. Jane Smiley

Christopher Benson

Read

Thunderstorms

I always loved it when my parents fought. It was rare and always overdue; a thunderstorm during a drought. The tensions would build for months and years, both of them popping Rolaids, mother popping Valium and step-father drinking. I hoped they'd finally divorce and I could go live with my step-father, finally escaping my mother. Had they discussed things rather than hold it all in for months, maybe they would not be the on the verge of divorce during every argument.

Manifesto - by Nemik

There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy.

Remember this, Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause.

Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.

And remember this: the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.

Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.

Remember this: Try. 

(Star Wars) 

The joke is mightier than the sword. Bassem Youssef

The importance of satire is bringing more people to the table. There are a lot of average citizens who aren't interested in politics and would be more interested if it's brought to them in a comedic, funny, satirical way.  Bassem Youssef

She took a bite out of the bread before popping it in the toaster. I'm glad my mother didn't name me Patience, she laughed.

Or Prudence! Al shouted from the den.

Aw shush, you. Good thing your mother didn't name you Mr. Clean.

Walt Whitman

There was never any more inception than there is now,

Nor any more youth or age than there is now,

And will never be any more perfection than there is now,

Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Habits develop as repeated behaviors strengthen neural pathways, making use of what’s called neuroplasticity. A habit is formed when we perform a particular behavior consistently. Gloria Mark

Stephen King: The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising.

Stephen King: By the time I was fourteen the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.

Stephen King: Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot if difference. They don't have to makes speeches. Just believing is usually enough.

Stephen King: Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

Stephen King: Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.

Stephen King: If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered anyway.

The whole system of autocracy is one built on individual degeneracy, the strongman and the toadies together.

"all I care about is what to do in response."

Article by Josh Marshall

make yourself ready to dream

Like your bedroom, your writing room should be private, a place where you go to dream. Your schedule — in at about the same time every day, out when your thousand words are on paper or disk — exists in order to habituate yourself, to make yourself ready to dream just as you make yourself ready to sleep by going to bed at roughly the same time each night and following the same ritual as you go.

Stephen King

Barbara Katzenberg of Lexington MA: When you feel despair, take a break. Come back refreshed when you can, because we need each person to play a role in reconstructing the country as we want it to be. And it’s probably going to take some time.

Today Baking 14 baby Sourdough Rye breads with Whole Wheat flour, Irish Oats, & Cornmeal

Jerry Greenfield: “It’s easy to stand up and speak out when there’s nothing at risk. The real test of values is when times are challenging and you have something to lose.”

 article

Nabokov: The lovely and lovable world which quietly persists.

Stories are the rich, unseen underlayer of the most ordinary moments. Mary Gaitskill

William Faulkner: Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Do not bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

William Faulkner: Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it.

― William Faulkner, Essays, Speeches & Public Letters  

William Faulkner: You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.

William Faulkner: Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.

a game that I have gone on playing ever since.

My father, without, I think, realizing what he was doing, made me think of writing as play rather than work. He was always telling me stories, encouraging me, taking an interest in my toy theater, and so on. And it seems to me that writing has been a game that I have gone on playing ever since. I am inclined to think of writers who bore me as being “workers.”

Christopher Isherwood

Bad writing is bad not just because the language is humdrum, but the quality of the observation is so poor. Christopher Isherwood

A few times in my life I've had moments of absolute clarity, when for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp. And the world seems so fresh as though it had all just come into existence. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be. Christopher Isherwood , A Single Man

We must remember that nothing in this world really belongs to us. At best, we are merely borrowers. Christopher Isherwood

The more I think about myself, the more I'm persuaded that, as a person, I really don't exist. That is one of the reasons why I can't believe in any orthodox religion: I cannot believe in my own soul. No, I am a chemical compound, conditioned by environment and education. My "character" is simply a repertoire of acquired tricks, my conversation a repertoire of adaptations and echoes, my "feelings" are dictated by purely physical, external stimuli. Christopher Isherwood

Christopher Isherwood: If it’s going to be a world with no time for sentiment, it’s not a world that I want to live in.

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed. Christopher Isherwood

 Goodbye to Berlin "Berlin Diary" (1939)

Christopher Isherwood: Sometimes awful things have their own beauty.

Christopher Isherwood: By helping yourself, you are helping humankind. By helping humankind, you are helping yourself. That's the law of all spiritual progress.

Christopher Isherwood: Only those who are capable of silliness can be called truly intelligent.

Lentil Vegetable Soup with Rice

I had no idea what to make for dinner so I thought, Make rice! Half the world starts with rice!

So I set up a bowl of basmati brown rice on the steamer tray in my Instant pot pressure cooker. Then I decided to add lentils and more water surrounding the bowl and then I added a bunch of freshly-chopped carrots to the water so it would be the start of a soup with the bowl of rice cooking simultaneously.

We walked our dog around the neighborhood and when we came back I took out the bowl of rice and then added a bullion cube to the soup along with some Chianti and Adobo and olive oil. Then I added frozen spinach and frozen peas.

I scooped the rice using an ice cream scoop and served it in small bowls. We enjoyed the soup in larger bowls with the rice, sometimes mixing them. It turned out to be delicious and colorful! 

Karen Attiah: I have been canceled by Columbia. I have now been canceled by the Washington Post. Institutions may cancel me, but my pen and my teaching will not be silenced. If anything, my voice will be sharper now. Forward ever, backward never. As always, we move!

 article

Elemental

Breathing is elemental to swimming the way the line is the core of drawing. The elemental never gets old. It's the touchstone we return to and build upon.

Flour, water, yeast, and salt becomes bread. I never tire of the miracle. 

Walking is a lot like writing. One step, one word. When I was growing up there was a man in our neighborhood who could be seen walking everywhere. The kids all knew; he's a writer.

Sometimes I walk to just live in my eyes. I call it poetry for the eyes, and oxygen for the brain. A rest from words. I especially like to walk through the city where my eyes can absorb evidence of life; color, motion, activity, and drama.

I swim to clean out my brain and be in the moment. You almost have to be in the moment when swimming. Water on your skin wakes you up just like a shower does.

I try to be in the present. It's a practice and a challenge. 

Mikel Jollet

read this thread.

Seth Magaziner: See the good in each other even when we disagree.

Stephen King: “Writing isn't about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it's about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It's about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy.” On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Harry Stooshinoff: These days when I paint there are no worries about the creative process, the quality of the work, or where and how it all fits into the larger scheme of things. That’s for other people to fuss over. I’m happy and content just to make the pieces, day after day.

Harry Stooshinoff: Make Daily Paintings and Take the Pressure Off! Why are you stressing over what you make?

 https://harrystooshinoff.substack.com/p/make-daily-paintings-and-take-the

Harry Stooshinoff: A Change is as Good as a Rest Make a small change....watch your energy go up!

 https://harrystooshinoff.substack.com/p/a-change-is-as-good-as-a-rest

Harry Stooshinoff: Markmaking is the subject. Whatever it is that you are painting, remember that the way you make a mark, the way you draw a line, the way you lay down the paint, is as much the subject of the picture as anything. These things will either have a visible energy, or they appear dead and suck energy out of you. Watch for the abstract life in the way things go together. Avoid redoing or over-brushing an entry for no apparent reason. Doing that is like using fillers when you talk….all the ums, ahhs, and thats, you knows, likes,…..kill what you are saying!

source

Harry Stooshinoff: Remove ‘making’ stress. It is play. Most everything will end up in the garbage over time anyway….that’s just a fact of existence. So use this fact to empower yourself. Find ways to explore in ways that are meaningful to you.

Harry Stooshinoff: Play has to be a major part of picture making, or over time, you will just run out of energy. Play is self sustaining and re-energizing, so find ways to make play a part of what you do in every painting session. A simple thing you can do is, when you have paints left over at the end of a session, make an improvised composition to use up the paints. Don’t consider those finished works, although you may find yourself going back into them at a later time. This really makes you fall in love with paint all over again. You may find it’s a way to break old habits in how to apply paint and use color.

Kevin Macpherson:“Painting is sort of like fishing. You are out there enjoying the beautiful day, feeling the wind, taking in the sights and sounds —you never really know if you are going to get anything or not!”

Physical activity also promotes the production of the brain’s feel-good neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and endorphins, which help regulate mood and feelings of pleasure.

“I couldn’t do much,” she says. “I sat outside on my front doorstep, dug in the soil a little bit and planted a few seeds.” Over time she built up her strength, and five minutes a week digging in the dirt morphed into five hours a day cultivating a garden. She’s now a renowned master gardener and author of 12 gardening books. 

“Gardening built up my physical strength, stamina, energy and there’s a feedback loop,” says Rose. 

Physical activity also promotes the production of the brain’s feel-good neurotransmitters, such as dopamine and endorphins, which help regulate mood and feelings of pleasure. Part of what encouraged Rose to keep gardening and regaining her sense of well-being was the reward of seeing things she had planted grow. “It was a burst of joy, serotonin, dopamine, all the happy chemicals that keep you going and wanting to do more,” she says.   article

Gisela Salim-Peyer: My father used to say that living in Venezuela was like driving a car that you know is not being maintained. For now, the car works fine, but one day it will break down. And when it does, the moment to repair the car will have passed.

Article: Authoritarianism Feels Surprisingly Normal—Until It Doesn’t

Rebecca Solnit

Rape is a crime against democracy in the most immediate sense of equality between individuals and the premise that we’re all endowed with certain inalienable rights. Most rapists operate on the premise that they can not only overpower the victim physically, but can do so socially and legally. They count on a system that discounts the voices of victims and only too often cooperates in silencing them, through shame, intimidation, threats, discrediting, the obscene legal instrument known as a nondisclosure agreement and a system too often run by men for men at the expense of women and children. That is to say, rapists count on getting away with it because of a system that hands them power and steals it from their victims. They count on a silencing system. On profound inequality.

Which is what makes rape such a peculiar crime: it is the ritual enactment of the perpetrator’s power and the victim’s powerlessness, buttressed by the circumstances that puts and keeps each of them in those roles. It’s driven by the desire to use sexuality to cause physical and psychic injury, to dominate, to celebrate the rapist’s power and the victim’s powerlessness, to treat another human being as a person without rights, including the right to set boundaries, to say no and to speak up afterward. A society that perpetuates and protects this desire and arrangement is rape culture, and it’s been our culture throughout most of its existence.  source

Simon Tisdall: Tyranny, from the Greek túrannos (“absolute ruler”), is typically fuelled by hubris and leads ineluctably to nemesis. Tyrants are for toppling. Their downfall is a saving grace.

collecting and cooking recipes engraved on headstones

You can have this recipe over my dead body

Rosie Grant has spent the past several years collecting, sharing, and cooking recipes engraved on headstones.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/09/08/opinion/gravestone-recipes-ghostlyarchive/

A Short Story about the Long Intestine

 

when I was a toddler 

My father was six foot four 

a towering angry tree with a deep voice

who I rarely saw

I inherited his tall man intestine 

stuffed into my child body

When I became 16

My mother wanted my intestine surgically shortened

A colostomy for no reason

except her own 

Sam Cooke: “My father told me it was not what I sang that was important, but that God gave me a voice and musical talent and the true use of His gift was to share it and make people happy.”

My neighbors work the night shift together at Cumberland Farms. They come home at 6 AM exhausted and I hear them fighting. This happens every morning but after an hour they are asleep for the day.

Yesterday we used the picker pole to reach the pears of Papineau Street. It was so fun. The exercise made me giddy. It's a lot of work for the arms and eye but an enjoyable challenge. These are seckel pears. They are firm, rosy and delicious.

 

Last night the gate was open when we left to drive to the apple orchard. This morning I see the sage and mint plants have been ripped out. The neighborhood kids love us and we love them.  Sometimes the affection is expressed as "I want more," I understand. 

Yesterday the littlest boy ran over to ask me if his shoes were on right because the other day the right sneaker was on the left foot and the left was on the right. Yes they are, I said and he did little dance. Then we fist bumped and he ran off. Every time the kids see us they run over say hello and pet Romeo. 

 

Toast

by Susan Deborah King

It’s worth getting up for. Just at dawn, on a dead-of-winter walk, I could smell it wafting from homes all around the lake as they emerged from the dark like loaves from an oven, steaming. Is there an aroma more divine than that of bread warming, bread browning, crisping for the spread of butter and marmalade, the sprinkling of sugared cinnamon? Whatever terrors the night might harbor, how bad can it get, if hot slices stack our morning plate (excerpt)

Knut Hamsun: There is nothing like being left alone again, to walk peacefully with oneself in the woods. To boil one's coffee and fill one's pipe, and to think idly and slowly as one does it.

Why I Love the City

I woke up grumpy after a nightmare of having a rash on my face.  I drank coffee took a shower and went out walking with my dog. An old man walked by. He was singing off key while wearing headphones, "Won't you dance with me?" He wore a kelly green T-shirt and shorts. A young woman wearing yoga pants and a midriff was pumping gas into her white SUV at the Mobil Station. The fog was burning off and the sun illuminated a couple chatting at the Motor Inn parking lot. The woman was wearing a tight fitting mermaid dress accentuating her curvy hips. She had magenta hair. Two 12 year olds buzzed by on scooters wearing khaki pants and maroon shirts, the middle-school uniform. They jumped off the bike path to get to school riding the last half-mile on downtown sidewalks.

Stop NOT writing. Just do it, badly. Just write the thing you need or want to write, that you are avoiding. That avoidance is costing you greatly, isometrically, and in general well-being. So can you find one measly hour, to write, badly? Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott's Post for the New York Times

I was a Sunday school teacher for 30-plus years, until recently, in a small liberal church in Northern California that rose out of the civil rights movement. I learned early on that when you have a lot of poor kids as students, you get to know tragedy up close — addicted or dead parents, shootings, the injuries and mortification of racism and poverty. So we talked more about tragedy than you might expect.

 

I never tried to comfort them with nice Christian bumper sayings or platitudes, especially after school shootings like the one at the back-to-school Mass at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis. “Hey, kids. Yay! God’s got a plan! Phew.” Still, we did believe that death was a pretty major change of address and that God caught the children as they left this life.

 

But when we read in the Hebrew Bible that weeping may last the night and that joy comes in the morning, I explained that this does not mean literally at dawn, like a new bike from Walmart. We’re talking long dark nights of the soul. And the psalmist didn’t mean joy joy, like Pop Rocks and the Village People. He meant relief and peace, eventually.

 

There should be one inviolable rule: Children are not shot or starved to death.

 

Driving to church after the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, I remembered a commentator saying that the measure of a nation is how many small coffins it allows. Of course, this explanation would not be useful to the younger ones in my class, two 9-year-old girls, or even to the teenagers, but it provided me with a hit of self-righteousness: We all know what the problem is. We allow people to own and use military-grade guns.

 

I always took my kids out to our small and slightly chaotic classroom midway through the adult service. They followed me like ducklings because they had been sprung and there would be snacks.

On that specific Sunday, I thought about going out of order and giving them their snacks first, before our discussion, to let them numb out a little on chips and sugar. There is so much evil and meanness coming from so many directions these days that we shut down and numb out on food, shopping, drinking, striving, whatever. After a few days, we forget to remember.

 

Instead, I started by asking them how they were doing in the face of the ghastly news out of Uvalde. They were pretty quiet. “OK,” one said. “Fine,” said another.

 

The rule of life is that the innocent suffer. Horrible people get away with horrible things. I asked them what their classroom teachers had them do the day after the shootings. A teenager mentioned shooter drills — “Run, hide, fight.”

 

This pierced me. I couldn’t stand seeing how helpless all of them felt. With so little to offer, I told them once again what Mr. Rogers’s mother told him: In the face of tragedy, look toward the helpers. That’s where we see goodness and sacrifice, and these give us hope. Let there be light, and let it begin with me.

I asked them who they thought they could most help, and without missing a beat, they mentioned the dead kids’ families, so my big kids got out the art supplies, and we started making cards with words of love, hope, glue and glitter (big mistake).

 

I didn’t tell them that good old Texas’ response was to propose teaching little kids how to stanch a classmate’s bleeding. Nor did I mention Fox News.

 

I mostly listened to them as they worked. I mostly listen to my peers, too, when they express the same helplessness and sense of doom. I remind them of what we can do — sing, sit in silence, light candles, take walks, make art. We register voters, pick up litter, overeat, sigh a lot, carry our pleas to our lawmakers: Please, please stop this. Only you can.

 

It is rough and harsh out there, and it seems, to my worried and paranoid self, worse by the day. We are a violent species in a currently violent nation. How do we take on these systems and structures of death?

We have to show up. We want to stay isolated from the suffering, but maybe the answer is to draw close — to the crying woman whose husband was deported to Manila, to the person whose son drove off a cliff, to the little ones who are practicing how to stay alive. You can cry with them, get them a glass of water, move their car if it is going to be towed, take a sandwich to the grandma who hasn’t eaten all day.

After one school shooting, my beloved rabbi friend Sydney Mintz told me a story from the Midrash (a collection of stories about what the Hebrew Bible teaches). When Moses smashed the original tablets with the Ten Commandments and stomped off back to Mount Sinai, someone swept up all the shards. They were eventually added to the ark alongside the replacement copy of the commandments.

 

We drag around our brokenness in the same container as our holiness.

 

Anger and murder have always been our lot and are going to keep happening. One of Adam and Eve’s sons killed another, and we still see this every day. It’s real, and all you can choose is how you’re going to react. Do you close yourself off, as if that will protect you, or do you try to stay open and get to work in the world?

 

The parents gathered around me that day to ask how they could talk to their kids about the shooting. Talk about love, I said, and listen. They asked: Was there meaning? No, not yet.

 

But, I suggested, perhaps it was a good day to make soup. When Syd feels most hopeless, she makes matzo ball soup for the sick and lonely and friends; in my Presbyterian tradition, we tend toward casseroles. These offer consolation to the soul. There are always a lot of people who need them, like me.

Meanwhile, their kids had escaped to the lawn, where they kicked around a mostly inflated soccer ball — some clumsy, some agile, sweaty, focused, radiant.*

What doctors wish patients knew about the impact of caffeine

Try small, frequent doses  “One of the things that people don't realize is, if you think of it as a medicine, then the best way to use it is in small, frequent doses,” said Dr. Kilgore. “So, 20 milligrams to 100 milligrams at a time as opposed to the standard American mug of coffee.

Caffeine can be part of a healthy diet for most people, but too much may pose a danger to your health. Four physicians share what to keep in mind.

True education should question assumptions, challenge dogma, and inspire curiosity, not enforce blind memorization or mediocrity. Bertrand Russell

A ‘super ager’ shares how she thrives at 90: Trapeze school and house parties Ednajane Truax often wears a shirt that says: “You don’t stop lifting when you get old — you get old when you stop lifting.”

Lemon Poppy Seed Waffles

https://theskinnyfork.com/blog/lemon-poppy-seed-waffles

At 5AM I saw a figure in the dark opening a passenger door in the shared parking lot. I watched and then called my husband to watch. I realized it was the girlfriend of the drug-dealer and she was camping in her car.

Eremition: a relatively new word for the act of gradually and peacefully withdrawing from the lives of others, not out of malice but for a desire for solitude, renewal, or reflection. It stems from the word "eremite" (hermit) and suggests a conscious, graceful fading out to regain internal peace, stillness, and clarity, with the intention of returning to the world with renewed energy and perspective.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: In New England, the seasons are written with a chisel. Winter is stern and rugged, spring reluctant, summer brief but ardent, and autumn magnificent beyond compare.

I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it's ripe; it will be exquisite by September.

 ― Virginia Woolf 

Titanic Menu

https://titanicfacts.net/titanic-menu/

Carl Jung: No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.

Mortimer J. Adler: Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

New York City

video

Visions of Lasagna

I had visions of lasagna for the past three days. I know it was because the ladies of 8th Street used to make the worlds best potluck for our band every year for ten years. They were competing which is why it was the best potluck in the world. It was a feast put on by seven loving Grandmothers! They all moved away although we still perform on 8th Street so far nobody has taken up the potluck tradition. 

Yesterday after baking granola and making tzatziki Greek cucumber salad, and pressure cooking a pound of garbanzo beans, I started the tomato sauce. It was bed time when the sauce was ready. Perhaps I will make the lasagna today.

I made the lasagna. There was eggplant bell pepper and chick peas and olives in the sauce. You wouldn't know it because the flavors melded. I used nonfat cottage cheese in place of Ricotta and no boil noodles and Asiago grated on top. It was delicious.

It's not about having things figured out, or about communicating with other people, trying to make them understand what you understand. It's about a chicken dinner at a drive-in. A soft pillow. Things that don't need explaining. Ann Beattie

I don't write about things that I have the answers to or things that are very close to home. It just wouldn't be any adventure. It wouldn't have any vitality. Ann Beattie

It seems to me that the problem with diaries, and the reason that most of them are so boring, is that every day we vacillate between examining our hangnails and speculating on cosmic order. Ann Beattie

You put a character out there and you're in their power. You're in trouble if they're in yours.

 Ann Beattie  

I think I write about things that are mysterious to me. Ann Beattie

There is some reason, obviously, that you are drawn to your material, but the way in which you explore it might come to be quite different from what you would expect. Ann Beattie

Whatever one intends, the work takes on a life of its own. Ann Beattie

I think almost always that what gets me going with a story is the atmosphere, the visual imagery, and then I people it with characters, not the other way around. Ann Beattie

Because I don’t work with an outline, writing a story is like crossing a stream, now I’m on this rock, now I’m on this rock, now I’m on this rock. Ann Beattie

Ann Beattie I can hardly think of anything that pleases me more than writing a sentence that surprises me.

 

I don’t begin with a preconceived notion of where a piece of writing is going to end. If you go around filling a grocery cart, you figure, I’m cooking for tonight. You are not often fooled in the grocery store as to what your approach should be. But I’m fooled by stories sometimes, thinking that I’m picking up something for the night, and it turns out that I’m shopping for a week or a month. I’m always happy when that happens. It’s not consistent fun like being on a roller coaster, but I can hardly think of anything that pleases me more than writing a sentence that surprises me.

Ann Beattie

Stephen King : When you are consumed by thoughts, WRITE When you are uninspired, READ.

Home Made Tzatziki Cucumber Salad

 I used fresh lime juice and I added Adobo salt.

• Shredded cucumber
• Greek plain yogurt
• White wine vinegar (i used red wine vinegar)
• Garlic, minced
• Fresh dill, chopped
• Lemon juice
• Salt & pepper
• Extra-virgin olive oil

• Here’s What You’ll Need to Have on Hand

  Tzatziki Sauce – Homemade is simple and makes all the difference in the world.
  Cucumbers – Peel the cukes in stripes, for a decorative appearance. We use a mandolin to get even, thin slices, but a sharp knife and a steady hand work just fine, too. 
  Red onion – Thinly sliced. The onion flavor becomes very mild as it mingles with the tzatziki sauce.
  Salt and pepper – This salad benefits from a little extra seasoning. Add a little salt, take a bite, and then add more, if desired.

   https://howtofeedaloon.com/tzatziki-cucumber-salad/

Espresso in the Moka Pot

We went to the local family hardware store and found a plumbing gasket and trimmed it to replace the crumbling 45 year old gasket for our 1 serving moka pot. And now it works like a charm. We learned that we should add boiling water to the pot rather than wait for it to boil and it made a huge difference in taste.

The Dalai Lama XIV

 “Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.” ― Dalai Lama XIV

 “Love is the absence of judgment.” ― Dalai Lama XIV 

“If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.” ― Dalai Lama XIV 

 “My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.” ― Dalai Lama XIV

 “There is a saying in Tibetan, 'Tragedy should be utilized as a source of strength.' No matter what sort of difficulties, how painful experience is, if we lose our hope, that's our real disaster.” ― Dalai Lama XIV 

 “Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to be alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it. I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others; to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. I am going to have kind thoughts towards others, I am not going to get angry or think badly about others. I am going to benefit others as much as I can.”

 ― The Dalai Lama XIV

“There are only two days in the year that nothing can be done. One is called Yesterday and the other is called Tomorrow. Today is the right day to Love, Believe, Do and mostly Live.” ― Dalai Lama XIV

Malcolm X: If you aren't careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.

“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.” ― Søren Kierkegaard

“The tyrant dies and his rule is over, the martyr dies and his rule begins.” ― Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard

“If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!” ― Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

“To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.” ― Soren Kierkegaard

“What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.... And people flock around the poet and say: 'Sing again soon' - that is, 'May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.” ― Soren Kierkegaard, Either - Or

“A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.” ― Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part I

“In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant… My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known — no wonder, then, that I return the love.” ― Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

“I see it all perfectly; there are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both.” ― Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.” ― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it… Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.” ― Søren Kierkegaard

“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” ― Søren Kierkegaard

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” ― Soren Kierkegaard

“Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” ― Soren Kierkegaard

“People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.” ― Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.” ― Søren Kierkegaard

Søren Kierkegaard: The only intelligent tactical response to life’s horror is to laugh defiantly at it.

Charles Bukowski: One of the finest things for me in all my life has been to close a door and to be in a room without anybody else about.

The Wily Survivor: The narcissist will try to steal your light, but it was never theirs to take. Your light is still here. Your empathy, your care, your good soul. The mission now is to protect it and share it only with those who are worthy.

Margaret Mead: Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.

Carl Jung: I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.

 

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

 ― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“Become who you are!” ― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None

One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters. Friedrich Nietzsche

Silence is worse; all truths that are kept silent become poisonous.

 ― Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

“And once you are awake, you shall remain awake eternally. ” ― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra - A Book For All And None

“Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man?” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

“One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

“But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caverns and forests. Lonely one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way goes past yourself, and past your seven devils! You will be a heretic to yourself and witch and soothsayer and fool and doubter and unholy one and villain. You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?” ― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.

― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra  

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.

Friedrich Nietzsche: The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.

Friedrich Nietzsche: The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.

Friedrich Nietzsche: In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.

Prof. Feynman Life is too short to worry about little things. Have fun. Fall in love. Regret nothing, and don't let people bring you down. Study, think, create, and grow. Teach yourself and teach others.

The purpose of going to the gym was to postpone the day when I would stop going.

The purpose of going to the gym was to postpone the day when I would stop going. That's what writing is to me: a way of postponing the day when I won't do it any more, the day when I will sink into a depression so profound it will be indistinguishable from perfect bliss.

GEOFF DYER