• "The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear." —[[Stephen King]]
• “The first great flowering of printed literature arrived, with works by such masters as Shakespeare, Cervantes, Molière, and Milton, not to mention Bacon and Descartes, entering the inventories of booksellers and the libraries of readers.” [[Nicholas Carr]], [[The Shallows]] [[books]]
• "“Along with the high-minded came the low-minded. Tawdry novels, quack theories, gutter journalism, propaganda, and, of course, reams of pornography poured into the marketplace and found eager buyers at every station in society. Priests and politicians began to wonder whether, as England’s first official book censor put it in 1660, “more mischief than advantage were not occasion’d to the Christian world by the Invention of Typography.” The famed Spanish dramatist Lope de Vega expressed the feelings of many a grandee when, in his 1612 play All Citizens Are Soldiers, he wrote:

So many books—so much confusion! All around us an ocean of print And most of it covered in froth” —[[Nicholas Carr]], [[The Shallows]] [[books]]"

• "Here are some of the essential take-homes: we all need nearby nature: we benefit cognitively and psychologically from having trees, bodies of water, and green spaces just to look at; we should be smarter about landscaping our schools, hospitals, workplaces and neighborhoods so everyone gains. We need quick incursions to natural areas that engage our senses. Everyone needs access to clean, quiet and safe natural refuges in a city. Short exposures to nature can make us less aggressive, more creative, more civic minded and healthier overall. For warding off [[depression]], let’s go with the Finnish recommendation of five hours a month in nature, minimum. But as the poets, neuroscientists and river runners have shown us, we also at times need longer, deeper immersions into wild spaces to recover from severe distress, to imagine our futures and to be our best civilized selves. Basically, we need hits from a full spectrum of doses of nature.” —[[Florence Williams]], [[The Nature Fix]] [[books]] Amazon Quote [[Personal Manual]]
• "The power and salvation of a people lie in its intelligentzia, in the intellectuals who think honestly, who feel, and can work.” —[[Anton Chekov]] [[Great Books Bookmark]]
• "Life exists in the delicate balance between not enough coffee and too much whiskey.” —Tiffany Duening @TiffaPiffa
• "I need love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on.” —Prozac Nation
• "If it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.” —[[Woody Allen]]
• "Of all religions the Christian is without doubt the one which should inspire tolerance most, although up to now the Christians have been the most intolerant of all men.” —[[Voltaire]], quoted in An Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World by [[Harry Elmer Barnes]] (1937) p. 766
• "The sense of spiritual relief, which comes from rejecting the idea of God as a supernatural being, is enormous.” —[[Sir Julian Huxley]], Religion Without Revelation
• "And if there were a God, I think it very unlikely that He would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt His existence.” —[[Bertrand Russell]], What is an Agnostic?
• "The foolish reject what they see and not what they think; the wise reject what they think and not what they see.” —[[Huang Po]]
• "A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.” —[[Albert Einstein]]
• "To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.” —Cardinal Bellarmine [[irony]] [[self-own]]
• "I thought the fact that people could get well from serious mental illness was good news and worth writing about. It was good news that it was more about biochemistry and neurotransmitters. There should be no shame or blame. There were illnesses like other illnesses.

It crossed my mind that if I was able to tell the story well enough to get it published and it sold well, I might make some money and it might be the end of shame and bland abs stigmatization. The medical model would reign supreme. Unequivocal diagnostic tests would be available shortly. Medications without side effects would come along a little later, and mental illness would become a thing of the past.”

—[[Mark Vonnegut]], "Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So"

• “It wasn’t until I started reading and found books they wouldn’t let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else.” —[[John Waters]]
• “There is a place for the adjective and for the descriptive passage, but these must be carefully handled. A piece of prose that had no adjectives would very quickly become sterile; so it really is a question of restraint. There is a psychological reason for this: If somebody sets out in great detail what is before us, we very quickly become bored. That is not the way we see the world; we look for salience, we look for the feature that will engage our interest… The trouble with overwritten prose is that it takes away from the reader the opportunity to imagine a scene. We do not want to be told everything; we want a few brushstrokes, a few carefully chosen adjectives, and then we can do the rest ourselves.” —[[Alexander McCall Smith]] on Writing Concisely WSJ.com
• They act as if they had never heard the question before. The what? they say. The air? What about it? We smile and rephrase the question: What does the air feel like to you, you being a bird, able to fly and all? Finally they seem to understand, and they meditate on this awhile. And then they begin: the air to us is a brother, a sister. We are intrigued, and lean in closer. The air, they continue, now quieter. We lean in yet farther. They peck us in the eye and laugh wickedly. Birds are bastards, every one of them. —[[Dave Eggers]]
• I stood on the bed, pointed my fingers at the fake stars, and screamed: "I changed the course of human history!” "That's right.” "I changed the universe!” "You did.” "I'm God!” "You're an atheist.” "I don't exist!” I fell back onto the bed, into his arms, and we cracked up together. —[[Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close]] [[books]]
• "Nothing is as simple as it's cracked up to be when it comes to doctrine since a lot of doctrine is just plain crazy and the brighter people within Christianity know that.” —[[Frank Shaeffer]]
• Research studies into brain disorders that affect social behavior suggest that our basic notions of right and wrong do not spring from what we learn in textbooks and Sunday school, or from laws handed down by messiahs and legislators, but from parts of the brain we hardly understand . . . Much of what we call ethics and morality, in fact, might not be handed down to us by holy books and human laws, but handed up to us by algorithms in the hidden brain, ancient rules developed in the course of evolution. People with normal brain functioning do not need to be taught to care about social relationships, and social relationships lie at the heart of all morality. —[[Shankar Vedantem]], [[The Hidden Brain]] [[books]]
• "But inside his head he is throwing buckets of water onto burning coals.” —[[Jon McGregor]], If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
• "Some sort of quota was exceeded at around age thirty-five. I now actually want to know less than I know about most celebrities." —[[David Foster Wallace]]
• “A gift that would not be a gift, but some tool or intelligence-enhancing game or other hidden demand that he measure up.” —[[Margaret Attwood]], [[Oryx and Crake]] [[books]]
• “Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties — all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion — these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.” —[[David Foster Wallace]]
• "You can drown in dogmatism now, too - radio, Internet, cable, commercial and scholarly print - but this kind of drowning is more like sweet release. Whether hard right or new left or whatever, the seduction and mentality are the same. You don't have to feel confused or inundated or ignorant. You don't have to think, for you already Know, and whatever you choose to learn confirms what you Know.” —[[David Foster Wallace]]
• "The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." —[[George Bernard Shaw]]