He felt as if all of this had happened before. He covered his heart with both hands to keep anyone from hearing the noise it made. But nobody heard it. – Eudora Welty, Death of a Travelling Salesman, 1941 Lately I have been thanking people for their vulnerability. It has occurred to me…
It goes a long way back, some twenty years. All my life I had been looking for something, and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what I was. I accepted their answers too, though they were often in contradiction and even self-contradictory. I was naïve. I was looking for myself and asking everyone…
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena…, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the…
Dispassionate objectivity is itself a passion, for the real and for the truth. – Abraham Maslow Over the past several days, the governor of Indiana has been defending his decision to sign into law a bill delivered to him by the state legislature. Perhaps most remarkable about his comments are these: The religious people of…
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm. – Aldous Huxley The spirit of the child. Hmmm. We put a lot of psychic burden on children. They are our hope for the future. They are our reason for living. They keep us…
In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm… in the real world all rests on perseverance. –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1967 was a year for learning perseverance. I had understood that financial aid would be coming like clockwork in the first weeks of the year. Eager to show my ability to be responsible, I…
In democratic ages men rarely sacrifice themselves for another, but they show a general compassion for all the human race. One never sees them inflict pointless suffering, and they are glad to relieve the sorrows of others when they can do so without much trouble to themselves. They are not disinterested, but they are gentle. – Alexis…
Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. ― Joan Didion, On Self-Respect Lately I have been writing an hour or more a day. Not the kind of writing that fulfills an obligation outside of myself, like responding to emails, sending thanks to contributors, or reporting on progress for a grant. I…
Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains. [Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.] ― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary During World War I, nine million people died. No event before that, except for possibly the Black Death in the middle ages, was as catastrophic. Nothing after that…
The prince is never going to come, everybody knows that; and maybe Sleeping Beauty’s dead. ― Anne Rice, The Queen of the Damned Recently in a conversation with a trusted friend, I remembered an incident that happened nearly 30 years ago. I was in a workshop in which problem solving was the prime topic. There were somewhere…
Creating Community for Everyone 