“Novelists keep going back to images that retain power for them and recycling them, reusing them in another context, coming at them from another angle to see what they suggest from there,” Russell Banks told the Paris Review in 1998.

“I can really see my life as a kind of obsessive return to the ‘wound,’ ” Banks once told an interviewer. “Going back again and again trying to get it right, trying to figure out how it happened and who is to blame and who to forgive.” Russell Banks

“They were gone and I missed them but even so I was very happy. For the rest of my life no matter where on this planet earth I went and no matter how scared or confused I got, I could wait until dark and look up into the night sky and see my three friends again and my heart would swell with love of them and make me strong and clearheaded.” Russell Banks

 “When you have never done a thing before and that thing is not simply and clearly right or wrong, you frequently do not know if it is a cruel thing, you just go ahead and do it. Maybe later you'll be able to determine whether you acted cruelly. Too late, of course, but at least you'll know.”
― Russell Banks, The Angel on the Roof

 “One of the most difficult things to say to another person is, I hope that you will love me for no good reason. But it is what we all want and rarely dare to say to one another – to our children, to our parents and mates, to our friends, and to strangers. Especially to strangers, who have neither good nor bad reasons to love us. And it’s why we tell each other stories that we pray will be transformed in the telling by that angel on the roof, made believable and about us all, no matter who we are to one another and who we are not.”
― Russell Banks, The Angel on the Roof

“Of all the animals on this planet, we are surely the nastiest, the most deceitful, the most murderous and vile. Despite our God, or because of him. Both.” Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“Secrets and lies, they eat your insides until all you have left is a hard thin skin that covers you like the shell of one of those eggs you poke a little hole in and draw out its eggy contents before you dye it for Easter.” ― Russell Banks, Lost Memory of Skin

“Public libraries are the sole community centers left in America. The degree to which a branch of the local library is connected to the larger culture is a reflection of the degree to which the community itself is connected to the larger culture.” ― Russell Banks

 “It's like a crime is an act that when you've committed one the act is over and you haven't changed inside. But when you commit a sin it's like you create a condition that you have to live in.”
― Russell Banks, Rule of the Bone

“We are the planet, fully as much as water, earth, fire and air are the planet, and if the planet survives, it will only be through heroism. Not occasional heroism, a remarkable instance of it here and there, but constant heroism, systematic heroism, heroism as governing principle.” ― Russell Banks, Continental Drift

“What you believe matters, however. It’s all anyone has to act on. And since what you do is who you are, your actions define you. If you don’t believe anything is true simply because you can’t logically prove what’s true, you won’t do anything. You won’t be anything. You’ll end up spending your life in a rocking chair looking out at the horizon waiting for an answer that never comes. You might as well be dead. It’s an old philosophical problem.”

― Russell Banks, Lost Memory of Skin

They're Photographs

“All those happy, pretty, successful people- he hated them because he knew they didn't really exist, and he hated even more the magazine that glorified them and in a way that made them exist, actors, rock musicians, famous writers, politicians. Those aren't people, he fumed, they're photographs.”

― Russell Banks, Continental Drift

When you are a long way from where you think you belong, you will attach yourself to people you would otherwise ignore or even dislike. Russell Banks, Trailerpark

As my own emotional life has become a little bit less tangled and turbulent and conflicted, I've been able, as a writer, to approach the characters and the world that they live in more directly. As a novelist, I have access to certain tools and strategies—for lack of a better word—that perhaps a person normally doesn't have just because, for instance, memory is a crucial novelist tool that has to be cultivated and preserved. And so I'm forced again and again through that to go back to my own childhood.

RUSSELL BANKS

Write all the time. I believe in writing every day, at least a thousand words a day. We have a strange idea about writing: that it can be done, and done well, without a great deal of effort. Dancers practice every day, musicians practice every day, even when they are at the peak of their careers – especially then. Somehow, we don’t take writing as seriously. But writing – writing wonderfully – takes just as much dedication.

THEODORA GOSS

 A novel, in its truest form, is a questioning of what it means to be human, of what a life is. But what makes it different from, say, a work of philosophical inquiry is, among other things, the way it uses (or misuses, or differently uses) language and, second, the particular sense of discomfiture it can provide. Not that a novel needs to disturb or dismay or unsettle in order to mesmerize or provoke, but it does, or should, force us to reconsider, to rethink. The fiction writer’s bravery, then, is her dedication to never second-guessing the reader, even at the risk of her own book’s likability; the reader’s bravery is allowing himself to trust the writer, to surrender himself to the world she has created.

HANYA YANAGIHARA

If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough. Meister Eckhart

Gratitude is heaven itself. William Blake

Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude. Ralph Waldo Emerson

To receive, you must be active. Keep in mind your purpose.

“A Spiritual Warrior looks for the most efficient and effective way to accomplish something -- the most direct way is a living truth.”
― John-Roger, Spiritual Warrior: The Art of Spiritual Living

“To receive, you must be active. Keep in mind your purpose. You will receive in direct proportion to your clarity of vision, your definiteness of purpose, the steadiness of your faith, and the depth of your gratitude.”
― John-Roger, Spiritual Warrior: The Art of Spiritual Living

I am convinced that all of the negative things we hear or do, or that other people do, boil down to two primary motivations: I want to give love and I want to receive love. Then why not, right this moment, steel ourselves against failure, against subterfuge, against deception, and cut straight to love? John-Roger, Spiritual Warrior: The Art of Spiritual Living

Once you love the enemy inside, once you embrace it, that enemy will transform and yield its power to you. John-Roger, Spiritual Warrior: The Art of Spiritual Living

“The darkness transformed the moment you accepted it, and all the power that was blocking you before now becomes the power of ascension, of upliftment. When you feel really negative and you talk about it—not as a victim but as a way of facing the enemy and loving it—you are saying, “Out of God come all things.” All things. That includes the negative things, too. Negative doesn’t mean bad; we make things bad by judging them.” ― John-Roger, Spiritual Warrior: The Art of Spiritual Living

Physics isn't the most important thing. Love is. Richard P. Feynman

The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion.

Richard P. Feynman 

I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.

 Richard Feynman

You do not find a happy life. You make it.

Richard Feynman

The only way to great happiness and deep satisfaction is to do something you love to the best of your ability.

Richard Feynman

Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.

Richard P. Feynman 

Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all.

 Richard P. Feynman 

There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Students don't need a perfect teacher. Students need a happy teacher, who's gonna make them excited to come to school and grow a love for learning.

The goal of teaching should not be to help the students learn how to memorize and spit out information under academic pressure. The purpose of teaching is to inspire the desire for learning in them and make them able to think, understand, and question.

You won't learn anything if you think you know everything already.

Basically, the dumber you are, the smarter you think you are and vice versa.

You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.

Genius doesn’t come from knowing all the answers—it comes from embracing uncertainty and following where it leads.

If you have a theory, you must try to explain what’s good and what’s bad about it equally. In science, you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty.

Great teaching is like jazz—it’s spontaneous, responsive, and deeply connected to the moment.

Education is not about filling your mind with facts; it’s about sparking curiosity and fostering the ability to think critically.

Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.

Students should be made to think, to doubt, to communicate, to question, to learn from their mistakes, and most importantly have fun in their learning.

If your theory doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong. It doesn't matter how beautiful it is.

Learning is the art of turning information into insight.

I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.

Educate yourself about things. Study hard what interests you the most. Don't worry about what others think of you, that's none of your business. Train your mind to think, doubt, and question. That's how you grow.        

Richard Feynman 

    

With freedom, flowers, books, who could not be perfectly happy? Oscar Wilde

Klangphonics is a three-piece techno band from Regensburg, Germany, incorporating the sound of a sewing machine

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Glimmers

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Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you. Harold Bloom

Tartle: This is a common word in Scottish parlance but one unknown to most English speakers outside of the highlands. This nearly onomatopoeic word describes that panicky hesitation just before you have to introduce someone whose name you suddenly can't remember.