Reflections of a Recreational Reader: Part V

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or your predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

-William Faulkner

The most extraordinary gift you've been given is your own humanity.

-Eustace Conway

A big heart is both a clumsy and delicate thing; it doesn't protect itself and it doesn't hide. It stands out...where you can see the soul pulse through.

-Bird by Bird

Above me, wind does its best
to blow leaves off
the aspen tree a month too soon
No use wind. All you succeed
in doing is making music. The noise
of failure growing beautiful

-Bill Holm

It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch.

You have to be stronger than your fears if you want anything done in this life.

-The Interpreter

Everybody is going to be what they are, and whatever they are, there's not going to be anything to apologize about. What we are, we're going to wail with on this whole trip.

-The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

Sometimes I go about pitying myself and all the while I am being carried on great winds across the sky.

-Lakota Sioux Saying

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed our soul.

-Bird by Bird

We all must suffer one of two things: The pain of great discipline, or the pain of great disappointment

We used to live on less than what folks throw away these days.

-The Last American Man

If you think about the world of a preschooler, they are surrounded by stuff they don't understand--things that are novel. So the driving force for a preschooler is not a search for novelty, like it is with older kids, it's a search for understanding and predictability.

-The Tipping Point

Just because your voice reaches half way around the world doesn't mean you are any wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.

-Edward R Murrow