Neil Gaiman

“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they've all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds... Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 5: A Game of You

Neil Gaiman

“Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you'd most like not to lose.”
― Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman

“Stories you read when you're the right age never quite leave you. You may forget who wrote them or what the story was called. Sometimes you'll forget precisely what happened, but if a story touches you it will stay with you, haunting the places in your mind that you rarely ever visit.”
― Neil Gaiman, M Is for Magic

Virginia Woolf

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Heart

Squeezing out my soapy red bathing suit under the shower-head looked like a heart pumping in my hands. The straps were arteries hanging down.

James Baldwin

“I can't believe what you say, because I see what you do.”
― James Baldwin

James Baldwin

“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

James Baldwin

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

James Baldwin

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
― James Baldwin

Isaac Newton

“I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.”
― Isaac Newton

“Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.”
― Isaac Newton

“Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy.”
― Isaac Newton

“What we know is a drop, what we don't know is an ocean.”
― Isaac Newton

“Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.”
― Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton

It’s the birthday of the man who said: “Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.” That’s Sir Isaac Newton (1643), born in Woolsthorpe, England.

In 1686, Newton published his Principia, which overturned nearly everything humankind had believed about the universe up to that point. In the book, Newton proved that the celestial bodies were governed by the same laws of physics as objects on Earth. He incorporated Kepler’s laws of planetary motion into his own theories about gravity, and established the three laws of motion. The First Law states that objects at rest tend to remain at rest, and objects in motion tend to remain in motion, unless they are acted upon by an external force; the Second Law states that an applied force on an object equals the rate of change of its momentum with time; and the Third Law states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Sir Isaac Newton said, “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

- Writer's Almanac

Dream

I dreamed I gave a neighbor a quart of my home made soup and then without his knowing I jumped into the back of his small yellow pickup truck. I didn't know where we were going. An inflatable red raft came loose from the truck and fell into the street. I knocked on the cab to tell him. He stopped the truck. "Will you go get it?" He asked. "Sure," I said running down the road.

I dreamed Bill and I were in downtown Providence driving in the little red Honda when it was accelerating by itself swerving towards buildings and people. I grabbed the emergency break to avert disaster.

I dreamed I was in the kitchen of Anthony Bordain's restaurant watching a Japanese chef cooking a thin steak. A crew of us were traveling with Bourdain and staying at a hotel that had zigzag patterns of orange and gold on the lampshades and bedspreads.

It Goes Like This Sometimes

I didn't have a plan but I was hungry and it was raining and that suggested soup. I started by simmering a pound of lentils and garlic and celery in vegetable stock. Then I noticed the onions were crying out to be used so I started chopping them up. I had to transfer everything to my stock pot so there would be room. Then I threw in a few carrots and potatoes and some leftover sausage and three cans of crushed tomatoes.

I went downstairs to fetch something and I ended up in the kitchen making a vat of soup. It goes like this sometimes.

The Mechanic's Dog

My mechanic told me a story about how he has to give his poodle distilled water so that her tears don't make rust-colored stains.

Anger

I told him a story about learning to release my anger, an emotion that I was afraid of. I explained that I finally had a safe place to experiment and that I was eager to try. I had been coached by a friend who then left so I could do this alone. She had suggested that I address a specific issue out loud in one sentence. What came to mind was It's my body. I spoke this sentence aloud and whacked a stack of pillows. I did this three times using a tennis racquet held over my head. It had an immediate and profound effect on me. I gagged and cried. The image that came to mind was of a boulder like Elephant Rock, moving a quarter of an inch. After that I stopped being afraid of my anger. I could honor and respect it. Now my spittoon-notebook is my safe place to explore my emotions and sometimes I get lucky and a poem grows there.

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.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Albert Camus

“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.”
― Albert Camus

C.S. Lewis

“You can make anything by writing.”
― C.S. Lewis

Franz Kafka

“Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
― Franz Kafka

Joss Whedon

I write to give myself strength. I write to be the characters that I am not. I write to explore all the things I'm afraid of.”
― Joss Whedon