A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.
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Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.
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His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it. You appear to be astonished, he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it. To forget it! You see, he explained, I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones. But the Solar System! I protested. What the deuce is it to me? he interrupted impatiently: you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.
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In the fall, when you see geese heading south for the winter fly along in v formation, one might consider what science has discovered as to why geese fly this way. Each bird flaps its wings creating uplift for the bird immediately following. A flock has a greater flying range in formation than a single bird would have on its own. When a goose falls out of formation, it feels the drag and resistance of trying to fly alone and quickly rejoins the formation. The goose takes advantage of the lifting power of the bird in front. The geese in formation honk from behind to encourage those flying up front to keep their speed. When a goose gets sick or wounded and falls out of formation, two other geese will fall out of formation with that goose to follow it down to lend help and protection. They stay with that fallen goose until it is able to fly or it dies. Only then do they launch out on their own or with another formation to catch up with their flock. People, who share a common direction and sense of community, can reach a goal more quickly and easily because they are traveling on the thrust of one another. It is harder to do something alone than together. It is beneficial to take turns doing demanding work. By sharing leadership and depending upon others in a group, there is a chance to lead and an opportunity to rest.
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What's money A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.
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A Woman is home caring for her children! even if she can't. Trapped in this well-built trap, A Woman blames her mother for luring her into it, while ensuring that her own daughter never gets out; she recoils from the idea of sisterhood and doesn't believe women have friends, because it probably means something unnatural, and anyhow, A Woman is afraid of women. She's a male construct, and she's afraid women will deconstruct her. She's afraid of everything, because she can't change. Thighs forever thin and shining hair and shining teeth and she's my Mom, too, all seven percent of her. And she never grows old.
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A proud man is seldom a grateful man, for he never thinks he gets as much as he deserves.
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A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.
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Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck
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Another piece of advice: when you proofread cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can. You have so many modifiers that the reader has trouble understanding and gets worn out. It is comprehensible when I write: The man sat on the grass, because it is clear and does not detain one's attention. On the other hand, it is difficult to figure out and hard on the brain if I write: The tall, narrow-chested man of medium height and with a red beard sat down on the green grass that had already been trampled down by the pedestrians, sat down silently, looking around timidly and fearfully. The brain can't grasp all that at once, and art must be grasped at once, instantaneously. And then one other thing; you are lyrical by nature. The timber of your soul is soft. If you were a composer you would avoid writing marches. It is unnatural for your talent to curse, shout, taunt, denounce with rage. Therefore, you'll understand if I advise you, in proofreading, to eliminate the sons of bitches, curs, and flea-bitten mutts that appear here and there on the pages of Life.
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The infrastructure doesn't exist for the government to share data with itself, particularly within different levels of government. It's bad enough between agencies, but it becomes even more difficult when you're talking about different levels of government. Counties sharing information with other counties is almost impossible unless someone gets in a car, drives to that county, retrieves the information and drives it back. What the private sector does very well is build the infrastructure which allows that information, which is public, to flow freely across jurisdictional and geographical lines. That's the benefit that the private sector has brought to this process.
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The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.
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The Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea are made of the same water. It flows down, clean and cool, from the heights of Herman and the roots of the cedars of Lebanon. the Sea of Galilee makes beauty of it, the Sea of Galilee has an outlet. It gets to give. It gathers in its riches that it may pour them out again to fertilize the Jordan plain. But the Dead Sea with the same water makes horror. For the Dead Sea has no outlet. It gets to keep.
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Yes, I sing songs about relationships on the edge, relationships of all kinds, but remember I did not write them all, ... They are not all based on my experiences. Years ago, I wrote with Dennis Walker and Bruce Bromberg, who were 10 years older and divorced two or three times. They had great senses of humor, which is where lines like 'a boatload of lawyers just sank' came from. It is their stories on Strong Persuader, my breakthrough album from 1986. Sneaking out the window, 'Porch Light,' they are not my songs or lines. So, my life is not as miserable as some of the music makes it out to be. My wife Sue and I have been married for 15 years. She's an actor, but Sue gets the credit she deserves on some of my songs.
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Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.
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When a girl gets cut, it's not like we're being snobs or anything. The girls pick the sororities they want, the sororities list the girls they want, it all goes into a computer, and the computer matches everybody up, ... We're not sitting in a room, going down a list, and saying 'Oh, I hate her.' It's a mutual match. Kind of like online dating...but that's a really rough comparison.
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'A truck driver was driving along on the freeway. A sign comes up that reads, ' Low Bridge Ahead.' Before he knows it, the bridge is right ahead of him and he gets stuck under the bridge. Cars are backed up for miles. Finally, a police car comes up. The cop gets out of his car and walk s to the truck driver, puts his hands on his hips and says, 'Got stuck, huh?' The truck driver says, 'No, I was delivering this bridgeand ran out of gas.'
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'A truck driver was driving along on the freeway. A sign comes up that reads, ' Low Bridge Ahead.' Before he knows it, the bridge is right ahead of him and he gets stuck under the bridge. Cars are backed up for miles. Finally, a police car comes up. The cop gets out of his car and walk s to the truck driver, puts his hands on his hips and says, 'Got stuck, huh?' The truck driver says, 'No, I was delivering this bridgeand ran out of gas.'
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There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in.
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Age affects how people experience time. The observations on this are well known, so it is only necessary to outline briefly what has been the experience of everyone I have ever talked to or read about: the years go faster as one gets older. At the age of four or six, a year seems interminable; at sixty, the years begin to blend and are frequently hard to separate from each other because they move so fast! There are, of course, a number of common-sense explanations for this sort of thing. If you have only lived five years, a year represents 20 percent of your life; if you have lived fifty years, that same year represents only 2 percent of your life, and since lives are lived as wholes, this logarithmic element would make it difficult to maintain the same perspective on the experience of a year
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A friend never defends a husband who gets his wife an electric skillet for her birthday.
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What they really hope is that the weather cooperates, that the consumer gets out early and shops, and they [retailers] don't have to wait ... and mark down some of their goods to move sales.
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The caterpillar does all the work but the butterfly gets all the publicity
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It is amazing how much can be accomplished if no one cares who gets the credit.
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It gets to seem as if way back in the Garden of Eden after the Fall, Adam and Eve had begged the Lord to forgive them and He, in his boundless exasperation, had said, All right, then. Stay. Stay in the Garden. Get civilized. Procreate. Muck it up. And they did.
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It's a funny thing that when a man hasn't anything on earth to worry about, he goes off and gets married.
Marriage
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Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned
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Never deceive the media or the public. Credibility is all we have to go on. Nothing gets done without total commitment and outrage mixed with political realism. Never assume anything: Check everything out yourself, at the source. Establish the credibility that when we start something, we finish it. With such track record, we then move to bigger struggles and more significant victories. No congressional bill or legal gimmickry by itself will save the animals. The courts can, at best, open up the possibility for us to intervene in defense of animals, but the courts will not act until effective protests disrupt the system's orderly operation.
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If you don't give your kid freedom to make choices with money, including stupid choices, he'll make plenty when he gets to college.
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Eliza has a ton of potential. She is still a little raw but is very fast and athletic. Eliza is a player who you like more and more each time you see her. She is someone we always knew had the ability, but she will continue to improve. I believe the sky is the limit for her. She's an athlete that has split time between track and soccer, and when she gets the chance to have all the eggs in one basket at Memphis, she will continue to excel.
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