“If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” —Shirley Chisholm.

 Born in Brooklyn, New York City, she spent ages five through nine in Barbados, and she always considered herself a Barbadian American. She excelled at school and earned her college degree in the United States. She started working in early-childhood education, and she became involved in local Democratic Party politics in the 1950s. In 1964, overcoming resistance because she was a woman, she was elected to the New York State Assembly. Four years later, she was elected to Congress, where she led the expansion of food and nutrition programs for the poor and rose to party leadership. She retired from Congress in 1983 and taught at Mount Holyoke College while continuing her political organizing. Although nominated for the ambassadorship to Jamaica in 1993, health issues caused her to withdraw. In 2015, Chisholm was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

“If you can only be tall because somebody’s on their knees, you have a serious problem.” —Toni Morrison

Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer. BARBARA KINGSOLVER

A lie does not cease to be a lie because it is shared by millions of people. On the contrary, the more widespread the lie, the more dangerous it becomes. Leo Tolstoy

Celebrity Tailor

My Grandparents Were Married For 60 Years. One Day I Asked My Grandfather: “What’s The Secret To Loving The Same Woman For A Lifetime?”  He didn’t laugh. He didn’t say “communication.” He didn’t say “date nights.” He looked at my grandmother, who was in the kitchen, and said: “You don’t love the same woman.” That confused me. He said, “She changes every few years. And if you don’t update the way you love her, you lose her.” He told me the girl he married at 22 wasn’t the same woman at 30. Motherhood changed her. Loss changed her. Time changed her.  “At 40,” he said, “she needed respect more than romance. At 50, she needed partnership more than passion. At 60, she needed presence more than promises.” And every time she changed, he had a choice: Complain that she’s “not like she used to be.” Or learn her again. He said the biggest mistake men make is this: They fall in love once. Then stop paying attention. “Loving a woman for a lifetime,” he told me, “is deciding to stay curious about her.”  Not assuming you know her. Not freezing her in the version you met. He leaned back and said something I’ll never forget: “If you stop studying her, someone else eventually will.” Sixty years. Not because it was easy. Because he kept relearning her.

@KLASSIQTUNEZ

 Celebrity Tailor

“I am fully aware and in full possession of myself. I have no desire to be understood, admired, pitied, or even known.” — George Sand

Søren Kierkegaard: Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day, I walk myself into a state of well-being and 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.

“It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.” — Rainer Maria Rilke

“To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing, red-hot iron; it burns into you and that is very painful. Therefore, to love somebody else in the first place is always an escape which we all hope for, and we all enjoy it when we are capable of it. But in the long run, it comes back on us. You cannot stay away from yourself forever. You have to return, have to come to that experiment, to know whether you really can love. That is the question—whether you can love yourself. And that will be the test.” — Carl Jung

“The world is increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn't very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more?” — Matt Haig

“Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead” — Aldous Huxley

“That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Who wants to live to be a hundred? What's the point of it? A short life and a merry one is far better than a long life sustained by fear, caution and perpetual medical surveillance.” — Henry Miller

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” — Kurt Vonnegut

Jean-Paul Sartre: I hate victims who respect their executioners.

“There's no light at the end of the tunnel there isn't even a tunnel. The best thing I can do is get drunk and listen to classical music. Yet I'm glad, somehow, that I threw my words in the air: confetti, celebrating nothing.” — Charles Bukowski

“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 — is sure to be noticed.” — Søren Kierkegaard

“I think it's so foolish for people to want to be happy. Happy is so momentary – you're happy for an instant and then you start thinking again. Interest is the most important thing in life; happiness is temporary, but interest is continuous.” — Georgia O’Keeffe

David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing

 https://davidlabaree.com/2026/02/23/steven-mintz-learning-to-write-like-ai-and-then-beyond-it/

“Every time a man gives way to vanity, every time he thinks and lives in order to show off, this is a betrayal. We do not need to reveal ourselves to others, but only to those we love. For then we are no longer revealing ourselves in order to seem but in order to give.” — Albert Camus