Quotes Written In My 2005 Journal

Submitted by Jentle on Tue, 09/05/2006 - 11:17
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  • "It was a book she had designed to cater for all the drifts and vagaries of her mind. To provide her with information, rough maps and sketches of a way to God." - Keri Hulme, The Bone People, p 329 (front page)
  • "Remember that happiness is a way of travel." - Roy M. Goodman
  • "But hands are sacred things. Touch is personal, fingers of love, feelers of blind eyes, tongues of those who cannot talk..." - TBP, p 71 (jp 52)
  • "It was the hermitage, her glimmering retreat. No people invited, for what could they know of the secrets that crept and chilled and chuckled in the marrow of her bones?" - TBP, p 7
  • "Gimme something escapist, Narnia or Gormenghast or Middle Earth" - TBP, p 16 (What's Gormenghast?)
  • He ruffles Simon's hair, smoothes it again. "Tama, you've never told Kerewin, have you?" in the same quiet-as-breathing voice.
  • His son shakes his head.
  • "Why?"
  • There's a long silence.
  • Because she'll know I'm bad, the boy mouths, and starts crying. Because she'll know I'm bad, he says it again and again, gulping miserably through the silent words, she'll know I'm bad.
  • "O Christ," says Joe, and cries with him.
  • - TBP, p 139
  • "Life gets better the older you grow, until you grow too old of course." - TBP, p 164
  • She's standing on the orangegold shingle, arms akimbo, drinking the beach in, absorbing sea and spindrift, breathing it into her dusty memory. It's all here, alive and salt and roaring and real. The vast cold ocean and the surf breaking five yards away and the warm knowledge of home just up the shore.
  • "Ahhh," she sings wordlessly, hugging herself, oblivious of the two behind her. She stamps her feet in the shingle, bends down and throws off her boots, and stamps again, bare feet tensing against the damp cold stones.
  • "I am back!" she calls in a high wild voice, "I am here!"
  • The wind blows more strongly in seems, and a larger breaker than the ones before comes crashing down in front of the woman and sends long white fingers speeding towards her. The foam curls round her ankles and Kerewin cries aloud with joy.
  • "O Thou art beyond all good but truly this land and sea is your dwelling place..."
  • She spins round, dancing herself round, spreading her arms wide in a welcome, her eyes alight.
  • - TBP, p 163 (jp 56)
  • "Okay, here goes... Aiki is not a technique to fight with... It is the way to reconcile the world, and make human beings one family. Winning means winning over the mind of discord in yourself. It is to accomplish your bestowed mission. Holmes addendum: and to discover your bestowed mission. Love is the guardian deity of everything. Nothing can exist without it. Aikido is the realisation of love. The way," stopping reading, and explaining, "Do is Japanese for a way. Ai means love, harmony, and ki is the vital spirit. Aikido can mean, the way of martial spiritual harmony, okay?"
  • "Okay." says Joe.
  • "... The way means to be one with the will of deity, and practise it. How can you staighten your warped mind, purify your heart, and be at harmony with the activities of all things in the universe? You should first make God's heart yours. There in no discord in love. There is no enemy in love.
  • ...
  • "Even standing with my back to the opponent is enough. When he attacks, hitting, he will injure himself with his own intention to hit. I am one with the love of the universe, and I am nothing else. There is no time or space before Uyeshiba of Aikido - only the universe as it is."
  • - TBP, p 199-200 Quoting Morihei Uyeshiba, Founder and Master of Aikido (jp 56)
  • "We want better reasons for having children than not knowing how to prevent them." - Dora Russell, via Toni Weschler, Taking Charge of Your Fertility, p 11 (jp 57)
  • "Abraham Kaplan's theory, The Law of The Instrument: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding." - TCOFY, p 20
  • I'm the odd one out, the peculiarity in my family, because they're all normal and demonstrative physically. But ever since I can remember, I've disliked close contact... charged contact, emotional contact, as well as any overtly sexual contact. I veer away from it, because it always feels like the other person is draining something out of me." - TBP, p 266 (hmmm... monster?)
  • Spirals make more sense than crosses, joys more than sorrows... - TBP, p 272
  • Each ring feeds my fingers with its particular virtue. A garnet gives courage, a tourquoise soothes. Greenstone enobles. Opal enlivens. Coral is shy, but full of ancient memory. And aquamarine quickens thought, lively as a dolphin in the open sea.
  • And some stones I avoid like the plague... diamonds are obnoxious and leave, somehow, a sick taste in the mouth. Emeralds are cold as death, idol eyes, and rubies are too luxuriantly, unctuously velvet...
  • - TBP, p 291
  • Overheard at Daycare -
  • Jackie (2) - "Marrrrcelaaaa... MaaaaaaarrrrrrcellllllAAAA!!"
  • Marcela (3) - "No! I don't want that!"
  • ....
  • J - "Yeeeessssss... You dooo-oooooo!"
  • M - "Nonono! I'm just PLAYING!"
  • I am a waste, a wilderness of alien gorse and stone that scores all who enter. O, Kerewin can stalk through in her grim and withering way, because she is self-contained, wrapped in iron, and I cannot reach her except on the terms she admits. Very few, very hard...
  • And Haimona... Ah Dear God, my Haimona... Haimona storms through any wilderness though it tears him bloody. I am afraid of his ardour. I am afraid of him. So they track my waste, and the waste yields nothing blessed yet. And no-one else attempts this desert...
  • ...
  • I cannot warm or heal the woman. I cannot warm or heal the child...
  • TBP, p 343-4 (jp 66)
  • Kerewin said at Moerangi, "Suffering is undignified." Suffering ennobles, I said, but I smiled to show her that I thought that was really bullshit. What was noble about enduring a hook in your thumb? And she said, "Sometimes, the dross is burnt off your character," and moodily she added, "But the scars that result from burning can be a worse exchange." - TBP
  • It's beautiful Geryon, she said hanging up the telephone.
  • It's a beautiful sculpture.
  • She put her hand on top of his small luminous skull as she studied the tomato.
  • And bending she kissed him once on each eye
  • Then picked up her bowl of peaches from the tray and handed Geryon his.
  • Maybe next time you could
  • use a one-dollar bill instead of a ten for the hair, she said
  • As they began to eat. [sic]
  • - Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red, p 35 (jp 74)
  • It was one of those moments that is the opposite of blindness. The world poured back and forth between their eyes once or twice. - AoR, p 39
  • Maybe I'll just keep talking and if I say anything intelligent you can take a picture of it. - AoR, p 40
  • Meanwhile music pounded across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being a self in a song. - AoR, p 101
  • "I love you as warm as an oven." - Elizabeth (4), running up and hugging me at the daycare
  • "So you did something wrong. God forbid you should ever do anything wrong. Everyone else, but not you. You're so much above mistakes. So damn good." - Sheri S. Tepper, After Long Silence, p 42 (jp 84)
  • I've always been your good boy, Mother. Yours and Dad's. I never asked questions. I always did what I was told. If I broke any rules, they were always little rules, for what Ithought were good reasons. I loved someone, even though I knew she loved me in a different way. I wanted a child, and she wanted to be my child. Still, I really loved her, and sometimes - oh sometimes all that love came back to me a hundredfold. And I thought if I went on being good, life would be like that always. Something bright and singing, something terrible and wonderful would come to me. - ALS, p 43-4
  • I've always thought paradise must be very perilous. Anything beautiful, anything that takes hold of your heart and shakes it - that's perilous. - ALS, p 107
  • "Like? She was... she was a lot like Wendra Gentrack. Edible. And sweet. Like some baby animal, soft and giggly. Kind of fearful. Not interested in much. A good cook. Beautiful looking. She only had one way to act toward men, flirtacious. She didn't mean anything by it. Sh efluffed up even for me, and I'm nobody." - ALS, p 202 (yikes)
  • "Bondri Gesel, this Loudsinger is defective. He has no pain feelings at all. Perhaps that is why he acts as he does."
  • Bondri regarded the Loudsinger [human] with disfavor. The Prime Song urged good returned for good, and when possible, good returned as an example for others, even when bad had been intended. However, the song also directed that those who kill without good reason must be disposed of in order that others may live in tranquility. Then there was the question of th etaboo. There was no good reason to break the taboo for this man. Now he looked down into Spider Geroan's expressionless eyes and attempted to apply the Song.
  • "Can you fix him?" he sang. "Can you fix him so he can feel?"
  • "Simple," caroled the giligee.
  • "Well, then, fix him," he said, with a sense of satisfaction that he did not even attempt to understand. "And when you have finished, tell the troupe they can eat him."
  • - ALS, p 244-5 (jp 85)
  • "I'm saying that when any of us get into relationships where one person totally depends on another, we kill something.
  • Ourselves, perhaps. Or them."
  • - ALS, p 293
  • But I've done as much as I can with the past. - TBP, p 381 (jp 86)
  • Primarily, that I forgo control over myself and my destiny. Secondly, medicine is in a queer state of ignorance. It knows a lot, enough to be aware that it is ignorant, but practitioners are loath to admit that ignorance to patients. And there is no holistic treatment. Doctor does not confer with religious who does not confer with dietician who does not confer with psychologist. And from what I can learn about cancer treatment, the attempted cure is often worse than the disease...
  • - TBP, p 416
  • "What do I love?" musing on it.
  • "Very little. The earth. The stars. The sea. Cool classical guitar. Throbbing flamenco. Any colour under the sun or hidden deep in the breast of my mother Earth. Ah Papa my love, what joys do you yet conceal? And storms... and the thunderous breaking surf. And the farout silent waves... and o, dolphins and whales! The singing people, my sisters in the sea... And anything that displays gentle courage, steadfast love. The still brilliance of garnet, all wine, water of life and bread of heaven and grave shimmering moon...."
  • - TBP, p 423
  • She really has an almost mystical belief in the energy that is released by working and playing hard - "The revitalizing fuel that makes development possible." And she sees it as her job to spark that fuel. - Paula Polk Lillard, Montessory in the Classroom, p xxiii (jp 102)
  • The curriculum for the environment consists of three types of materials: materials through which th echildren can develop their skills for independence and academic knowledge, art materials (including writing tools) for their expression of self, and materials for the maintenance of the room so that they can develop pride in and responsibility for their own environment. Each of these materials is organized down to the smallest detail so that children can use them independently. - MitC, p 11
  • She wept even harder. "You should not have to take care of me, too! I at least should not be a burden."
  • He kissed her on the top of her head. "No burden," he murmured. "Love never is."
  • - Sharon Shinn, The Safe-Keeper's Secret, p 115 (sweet, but unrealistic)
  • Various quotes from the Werewolves! game -
  • "Mo FREELY ADMITS she's evil!!" - me
  • "I am so not smooth!" - also me
  • "BUT HE'S A REDSHIRT!!" - several people, about Xot
  • "Don't cry for me, Argentina...." - June, singing her "impassioned plea" for her life
  • Gareth screaming his death and scaring everyone.
  • - jp 108
  • Overheard at the daycare - siblings
  • Julia (4, singsong) I am a One-der
  • Jeremy (7) No, you're a monster!
  • - jp 110
  • He was not without philosophy, this shopkeeper, and he knew that if a raven comes into your delicatessen and steals a whole baloney it is either an act of God or it isn't, and in either case there isn't very much you can do about it.
  • - Peter S. Beagle, A Fine & Private Place, p 9 (jp 119)
  • I told people I was thirty-three beause it saved questions about why I liked books. - AF&PP, p 47
  • We both had delusions of kindness. - AF&PP, p 61
  • [The 4 most important characteristics to teach well:]
  • I try to remain intellectually alive. This is important for any teacher, but I think it is essential in teaching five-year-olds. A person who has no knowledge of man's history and achievements, or whose interest in them has died, cannot present the world to children and keep alive their interest in it...
  • I try to develop my intuition. I need the capacity to sense what others are feeling and an awareness of the subtleties of their behavior.
  • Being sensitive to others means being sensitive to oneself. An interest in and capacity for self-knowledge is essential when teaching young children. It is only through self-knowledge that humility and an acceptance of human limitation becomes possible. Ease with and confidence in self are sensed immediately by small children. To a person who has these qualities they will give a place of legitimate authority in their lives. Ineed to occupy this place in the lives of the children in order for them to trust me to set limits for them and to choose a direction of knowledge for them to follow.
  • I try to develop flexibility. A rigid, controlling person cannot lead the children to independence and self-disciplined responses to life.
  • ....
  • The framework of the teaching relationship which I try to develop is one of teamwork.
  • - MitC, p 13-4 (jp 120)
  • I want to talk to the children about books first, for example, and show them how we are going to care for them and use them here, before giving them any to handle. I want to introduce each material..." - MitC, p 19 (hmm... controlling or wise?)
  • "The fact that I adore you is but one of my truths." - Ani DiFranco, School Night (jp 126)
  • Overheard at the daycare - Kids on Marriage:
  • Jeremy and Cameron were deciding who would marry Jeremy's sister Julia.
  • Jeremy - "I'm going to marry her because she lives with me!!"
  • Next day, James and Cameron are playing.
  • James - "If she stays your wife, you can't be my boyfriend."
  • Also - "If Julia doesn't eat some bubble gum then she will not be your wife."
  • Me - "Well, that's an easy divorce."
  • "Human beings will perform for the person they love." If a person loves himself, he will do it for himself. If he does not have that high self-esteem or belief in self, he will have to do it for someone else until the time comes that he does love himself.
  • This psychology also teaches us that it takes years to remediate a damaged self-concept. In the meantime, a student with such a self-concept will most likely do school assignments when doing them for someone he or she loves.
  • - Jim Fay & David Funk, Teaching With Love & Logic, p 20-1 (jp 135)
  • Experiment with your most uncooperative student. Go to that student six times over the next three school weeks and use a "one sentence intervention." This should take a few seconds each time.
  • Each intervention should consist of only one sentence, and that sentence should start with the words, "I noticed..." Then you fill in the blank with something personal about the student - something positive and true. It is important that your statement not focus upon school activities. This is strictly about the student's personal life.
  • ...
  • If the student wants to visit with this... do so. However, do not praise or judge. If you feel compelled to say something, you might add, "Well, I noticed that."
  • ...
  • Be cautious. Don't use the phrase, "I like." Kids who have low self-esteem often feel manipulated when a teacher says, "I like."
  • - TWL&L, p 21
  • The name of the game in teaching is getting kids to cooperate. Love & Logic teachers agree that they get the best cooperation when they remeber to provide a lot of choices throughout the day. - TWL&L, p 30
  • Student: I can't do it. It's too hard.
  • Teacher: Aren't you glad I don't believe that?
  • - TWL&L, p 42
  • Norms Teachers Must Face
  • Norm #1: Do Kids Have Rights?
  • Today things are different. Tere are lots of students who give teachers lots of trouble. Moreover, there are many students who feel they are entitled to do so. A fairly common phrase teachers hear from students is "I've got rights." The fact is, they do. Students may indeed have more rights than any teacher in the school situation. The problem this creates is that old techniques that worked years ago with kids who had no rights simply do not work with kids who do.
  • ....
  • We can no longer argue whether or not youngsters have rights. In some instances they do, and in others they don't.
  • The important thing to remember is: students who believe that their rights are being violated do not respond positively to teachers' requests.
  • This is especially true when teachers rely on orders and threats that were effectively used on them by teachers when they were children.
  • - TWL&L, p 56-7
  • "You have not lived 'til you've listened to the high speed police chase that you're in on the car stereo that you're driving!" - Danny Bonaduce, VH1 100 Greatest Kid Stars (jp 136)
  • "All that time at Lady Heather's and you never learned that the submissive is the one in control?" - Grissom, CSI 2003 (jp 144)
  • Overheard at the daycare: Julia
  • Meanie, meanie
  • Minie, moe.
  • Catch a tiger.
  • Burn a toe.
  • If it hollers,
  • Let it go.
  • My mommy told me to pick the best one
  • And you are it!
  • "If anyone needs me, or your grandmother drops dead, I'll be at the vicarage." - Midsommer Murders, Garden of Death (jp 150)
  • "Everyone should experience Ohio at least once. If you stand in the middle of any suburb in Cincinnati, and you are real quiet, you can hear everyone silently screaming." - Ninja, Vermont transplant and Co-op grocery bagger
  • "You Americans are born restless," said Clive. "I don't know how you stand going to bed at night and just lying there till morning." - Constance and Gwenyth Little, The Great Black Kanba
  • They all lived in anonymous suburbs of cities in those states whose names begin with an I and which Smoky's City Friends couldn't distinguish from one another. - John Crowley, Little, Big, p 5 (jp 153)
  • "But see?" She said. "It was all meant to be. And I knew it."
  • "But why?" He said, delighted, in torment; "Why are you so sure?"
  • "Because it's a Tale. And Tales work out."
  • - L,B, p 17
  • [She] said, as she had every morning since she could speak, her prayers:
  • O great wide beautiful wonderful world
  • With the wonderful waters around you curled
  • And the beautiful grass upon your breast
  • O World you are beautifully dressed.
  • - L,B, p 23
  • "I guess I was sort of a polytheist."
  • "What?" said Mrs. Drinkwater.
  • "The Pantheon. I had a classical education."
  • "You have to start somewhere," she replied.
  • - L,B, p 28
  • And yet - strange - no matter how he removed himself from the world, no matter how he poured the rich grains of his working life into such schemes, he flourished; his investments turned over at a great rate, his fortune only increased.
  • - L,B, p 54 (why'd I write this one down? why do I care?)
  • "You don't act innocent." She laughed, and so did he; it was the laugh Sophie heard. "Shameless."
  • "Yes, that too. The same thing, I think. Nobody ever told me what to be ashamed of. Afraid of - they don't have to teach that. But I got over that." With you, he might have said.
  • - L,B, p 69
  • "I never had a childhood... not like you had. In a way I never was a child. I mean I was a kid, but not a child..."
  • "Well," she said, "You can have mine then. If you want it."
  • - L,B, p 69 (this one tears at my heart)
  • It was as though Daily Alice were made of some dark glass which had always been partly opaque, but now, helf up before the bright lamp of Smoky's love, became wholly transparant, so that no detail of Alice could be hidden from her as she watched them.
  • - L,B, p 70
  • If you know how to read, the World of Books is open to you, after all; and if you like to read, you'll read. If you don't, you'll forget whatever anybody makes you read, anyway. - L,B, p 94 (jp 154)
  • "Boy," he'd say, "You ought to go to school with my fother. He never lets you forget a thing." - L,B, p 94
  • And when she was asleep, he found himself staring into the sparkling phantasmal ceiling, surprised by sleeplessness, hot having heard of the rule whereby one spouse can trade a restlessness for the other's sleep - a rule spelled out in no marriage contract. - L,B, p 95
  • She brushed away impatiently the hot drops that rolled down her cheeks, rolled down because she couldn't explain: nothing she knew could be said, there were not the words, when she tried the very saying of it made what she said into lies or stupidities. - L,B, p 105
  • As in any deck... there are 52 cards for the 52 weeks of the year, 4 suits for the 4 seasons, 12 court cards for the 12 months and, if you count them right, 364 pips for the days of the year... This is the old year, before they knew better. - L,B, p 156-7
  • "Well, my God, there's room for one more," Mother said, drying a tear, "It's not like it was the first time it ever happened in the world." - L,B, p 167
  • So few of us, she thought, so much love and so few to spend it on, no wonder we get tangled up. - L,B, p 168
  • She knew she mustn't smile while Smoky told his story, but she felt so kindly toward him, wanted so much to take him in her arms and kiss the soul she saw clearly rising to his lips and eyes, so brave and honest he was being... - L,B, p 172
  • She had grown greatly heavy beside him, seemed to weight her side of the bed like a treasure, the richer for its compactness, and richer still for being all unconscious of itself. - L,B, p 224
  • I am always amazed and threatened by the whole body/mind thing. The fact that despite everything I've been taught, the Dodge Dart of my scourge-the-body-to-save-the-soul upbringing keeps running into a low brick wall that's been spraypainted it's all connected asshole. I would say something Cartesian right now, but I like Descartes. Or was it Aquinas, getting drunk and running around in orchards, with his mother praying for him to find a job and quit having so much fun.
  • - fussy.com
  • The Frightening Truth About Desire
  • It's on but
  • I don't know
  • Whether I want
  • To be
  • Her, fuck her
  • Or borrow
  • Her clothes.
  • - Daphne Gottlieb
  • Where Grace was concerned, my confidence faltered. That was the problem with love: It made me doubt myself. - Lauren Belfer, City of Light, p 24 (jp 157)
  • I made it a policy to stay in the background when I took the girls on field trips. People didn't expect enough from these girls, and it was my job to expect more. To make them expect more from themselves. - CoL, p 75 (here, here!)
  • [We] had never made demands on one another. We were simply best friends, our relationship a given. - CoL, p 96 (a nice dynamic where possible, but can make it easy to lose each other)
  • People can be so judgemental about children... Especially people who spend little time with them. Seeing the worrisome in the normal and then totally missing something that's actually wrong. - CoL, p 131
  • Standards are goals, aren't they? Goals that we all struggle to live up to, as we try to be good people. To be the kind of people we ourselves can respect. - CoL, 212
  • Oh yes, they were told over and over that men would attempt to assault their virtue and they must never give in. But they were told in such a way that they expected the assaults to be aggressive. Faced with sweetness, with tenderness and vulnerability... they were helpless. - CoL, p 213
  • I never realized that everything I needed to know about her had been laid before me, if only I'd been paying attention. - CoL, 290
  • Why did everyone assume I knew their secrets? - CoL, p 345
  • Safe within my father's love, I felt myself joined to a universe of infinite possibility. - CoL, p 393
  • Wait, I always advised parents and teachers, until the child herself has thought to ask a question about sensitive issues, and then answer only that specific question. Don't feel called upon to explain the meaning of the universe. - CoL, p 449
  • Grace - you can't look at things only as good or bad. Things aren't that simple. You thought you were doing the right thing when you did it. You have to try to see the shades of gray, the way you do when you're drawing, and forgive yourself and promise yourself to do better. That's how God forgives. By seeing the shades of gray. By seeing into your heart and what you truly feel and what you truly are, deep down. And how you learn from the things you do wrong and try to do right the next time.
  • - CoL, p 492
  • Nowadays, enlightened medical schools will hire a "pelvic educator," a sort of professional vagina who allows the students to practice on her and offers personalized feedback and is, in my book anyway, a nominee for sainthood. - Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, p 31 (I could TOTALLY do that... where do I sign up?)
  • "The pictures in the anatomy atlas did not show nail polish," she wrote. "Did you choose the color?... Did you think that I would see it?... I wanted to tell you about the inside of your hands... I want you to know you are always there when I see patients. When I palpate an abdomen, yours are the organs I imagine. When I listen to a heart, I recall holding your heart." - Stiff, p 38
  • The position of women in a society provides an exact measure of the development of that society. - Gustav Geiger, jp 158
  • Only what I have lost is what I possess forever. - Rachel
  • Woman is woman's natural ally. - Euripides
  • Yes it hurts when buds burst, there is pain when something grows. - Karin Boye
  • A woman can't be, until a girl dies...
  • I mean the sprites that girls are, so different from us, all their fancies, their illusions, their flower world, the dreams they live in. - Christina Stead
  • What Smoky liked about his girls' growing up was that, though they moved away from him, they did so (it seemed to him) less from any distate or boredom than simply to accommodate a growth in their own lives. - L,B, p 287 (jp 172)
  • Sophie was not one of those maiden aunts whose unused beauty comes to seem dried and pressed, like a flower - for one thing she was no maiden - but it did seem that her youth couldn't be outgrown, that she had never and would never become a person of mature years. Daily Alice looked now, at almost fifty (fifty, good Lord) just as she ought, as though she had shed the successive skins of childhood and youth and come forth thus, whole. Sophie looks sixteen: only burdened with a lot of unnecessary years, almost unfairly, it seemed. Smoky wondered which, over the years, he had oftenest thought the more beautiful.
  • - L,B, p 291 (Sophie's like my mom in this...)
  • Without ever knowing he did so, he adopted for life her standards of beauty, could even feel himself drawn to the lean, brown, soft-eyed, strong-wristed men she favored. - L,B, p 300
  • Unlike all the others he played with who said "Let's pretend," she always used another formula - she said "We must." We must be bad guys. I must be captured and tied to this tree, and you must rescue me. I must be queen now and you must be my servant. Must! Yes... - L,B, p 302-3 (This is utterly charming to me for some reason.)
  • Sex, he had found out, was really terrific. - L,B, p 302 (Somebody give that boy a prize!)
  • The difference between the Ancient concept of the nature of the world and the New concept is, in the Ancient concept the world has a framework of Time, and in the New concept, a framework of Space. - L,B, p 308
  • According to Snyder's paper, the maximum speed at which a human being has a respectable shot at surviving a feet-first - that's the safest position - fall into water is about 70 mph. Given that the terminal velocity of a falling body is 120 mph, and that it takes only five hundred feet to reach that speed, you are probably not going to fall five miles from an exploding plane and live to be interviewed by Dennis Shanahan. - Stiff, pg 212 (jp 173)
  • I ask Dennis whether he has any advice for the people who'll read this book and never again board a plane without wondering if they're going to end up in a heap of bodies at the emergency exit door. He says it's mostly common sense. Sit near an emergency exit. Get down low, below the heat and smoke. Hold your breath as long as you can, so you don't cook your lungs and inhale poisonous fumes. Shanahan prefers window seats because people seated on the aisle are more likely to get beaned with the suitcasse that can come crashing through the overhead bin doors in even a fairly mild impact. - Stiff, p 127
  • "The animals selected were beeves about to undergo slaughter in the Chicago stockyards," wrote La Garde, deeply perplexing the ten or fifteen people who would be reading his book later than the 1930s, when the word "beeves," meaning cattle, dropped from everyday discourse. - Stiff, p 134
  • When I tride to explain beating-heart cadavers to my stepdaughter Phoebe yesterday, it didn't make sense to her. But if their heart is beating, aren't they still a person? she wanted to know. In the end she decided they were "a kind of person you could play tricks on but they wouldn't know." Which, I think, is a pretty good way of summing up most donated cadavers. The things that happen to the dead in labs or ORs are like gossip passed behind one's back. They are not felt or known and so they cause no pain. - Stiff, p 170
  • To quote Vivian Nutton, author of "The Anatomy of the Soul in Early Renaissance Medicine" in The Human Embryo, "Analogies drawn from the inspection of hen's eggs foundered on the objection that man was not a chicken." - Stiff, p 177
  • "I'm going to the Fourth World! It's sort of like Heaven, only better because there aren't any Christians." - Heavenly Creatures
  • If caring communication can drive sick children sane, its principles and practices belong to parents and teachers. - Dr Hain G. Ginott, Between Parent & Child, p xii (jp 176)
  • Strong feelings do not vanish by being banished. - BP&C, p 17
  • A sophisticated view of human reality takes account of the possibility that where there is love, there is also some hate; where there is admiration, there is also some envy; where there is devotion, there is also some hostility; where there is success, there is also apprehension. It takes great wisdom to realize that all feelings are legitimate: the positive, the negative, and the ambivalent. - BP&C, p 26-7
  • When eight-year-old Diana lost the birthstone in her ring, she started to cry bitterly. Her father looked at her and said clearly and forcefully, "In our home stones are not that important. People are important. Feelings are important. Anyone can lose a stone, but stones can be replaced. It's your feelings that matter to me. You really like that ring. I hope you find the stone." - BP&C, p 42
  • Three Steps To Survival
  • 1. We accept the fact that will sometimes get angry in dealing with children.
  • 2. We are entitled to our anger without guilt or shame.
  • 3. Except for one safeguard, we are entitled to express what we feel.
  • We can express our angry feelings provided we do not attack the child's personality or character.
  • - BP&C, p 49
  • "David is upset today. He's worried about his visit to the dentist. Right now he needs all our consideration." - BP&C, p 53
  • When a child is promised a visit to the zoo, she considers it a commitment that the day will not be rainy, that the car will be in the garage, and that she will not be sick. - BP&C, p 61
  • When we know the answer, we do not ask the question. - BP&C, p 72
  • There is no escape from the fact that children learn what they live. - BP&C, p 81
  • Whenever I hear the word "spiritual," I reach for my revolver. - Jim Knipfel, Ruining It For Everybody, p 1 (jp 180)
  • 'Her name is Reese - Reese Witherspoon. And that's Cameron - Cameron Diaz.' - Mom at Storytime in Border's 8/3/05 (Yes, dears, your mommy is a celebrity whore...)
  • Auberon wouldn't ever decide whether he loved her more when her attention was on him, or when as now it was fixed on some task or thing in the real world. He couldn't write a story about her: it would consist only of catalogues of her actions, down to the most minute. But her had no real desire to write of anything else. - L,B, p 318 (jp 186)
  • Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow cycles of nature, is a help. - May Sarton (jp 188)
  • "Compost should not be ugly," she is saying. "It should be lovely, it should be romantic." She feels similarly about dead bodies. "Death is a possibility for new life. The body becomes something else. I would like that that something else be as positive as possible." - Stiff, p 263 (jp 190)
  • "When we are burning remains, we don't give it back to the earth. We are built up from nature, and we have to give it back." - Stiff, p 272
  • You have to admire a woman who can toss the word "urine" into a corporate presentation. - Stiff, p 273
  • It makes little sense to try to control what happens to your remains when you are no longer around to reap the joys or benefits of that control. - Stiff, p 290
  • The main purpose of music education in childhood is to provide an effective outlet for feelings. A child's life is so full of restrictions, regulations, and frustrations that outlets of release become essential. Music is one of the best avenues of release: It gives sound to fury, shape to joy, and relief to tension. - BP&C, p 104
  • A child does not learn to love music from a teacher whom her or she hates. - BP&C, p 105
  • A child is encouraged most when he or she knows that difficulties are understood and appreciated. - BP&C, p 106
  • Girl #1: Has anyone heard from Megan lately?
  • Girl #2: No.
  • Girl #1: I mean, her away message for three days has been, 'Break out the turkey basters and gin buckets!'
  • Girl #3: I'm sure she's fine.
  • - Overheard on the Staten Island Ferry (postcard from Aud) jp 192
  • (I needed to bring Jacob - 6, Down's Syndrome - inside and found him sitting in the sandbox, pointing at a small hill...)
  • Me - 'Wow! You made a pile!... What is it?'
  • Jake - '....VOLCANO!'
  • Me - 'A volcano?? We should run away!... Or are we safe?'
  • Jake - 'HEROS.'
  • Me - 'We're heros? VOLCANO HEROS?? Alright! High-five! I LOVE it when we're volcano heros! Let's go tell Cathy.'
  • (... and he ran in the house, telling everyone - 'VOLCANO!'... score one for me.) ;)
  • - jp 204
  • At his people's greatest need, he will issue, with his paladins, to aid them, and to rule then over a new Golden Age. Rex Quondam et Futurus. Aurthur in Avalon; Sikander somewhere in Persia; Cuchulain in every other fen or glen of Ireland; Jesus Christ himself. - L,B, p 344 (jp 208) (I do so love comparative mythology lists.)
  • Reasonable as they might seem, people like this who live on the street are differently composed from people who live in houses. They have a reason for being where they are, expressed in a peculiar apprehension of things, a loss of engagement with the ordinary world and how it goes on, often unwilled. - L,B, p 353
  • What should free her bound her... - L,B, p 321
  • Sophie had no reason to love them; but the thought of their passing away utterly was unbearable: like thinking of a winter with no end. - L,B, p 432
  • "It's as though I were with you like in one stage of your development - like a pupa stage, or a nymph stage. But you outgrew that. Became a different person. Like a butterfly does." Yes: she had broken from the transparent shell which was the girl he had known and touched... - L,B, p 373
  • Smoky looked up at his tall son. Through the whole of their lives together, it had been as though he and Auberon had been back to back, fixed that way and unable to turn. They had had to communicate by indirection, through others, or by craning their necks and talking out the sides of their mouths; they had had to guess at each other's faces and actions. Now and then one or the other would try a quick spin around to catch the other unawares, but it never worked, quite, the other was still behind and facing away, as in the old Vaudeville act. And the effort of communication in that posture, the effort of making oneself clear, had often grown too much for them, and they'd given it up, mostly.
  • - L,B, p 403
  • (Sitting at Chick-Fil-A drive through)
  • Customer - Does the #2 have chicken on that?
  • Employee - It's a charbroiled chicken sandwich... Yes, there's chicken on that.
  • ... long pause...
  • C - And the nuggets? Do those contain chicken?
  • E - Ma'am... This is Chik-Fil-A. Everything has chicken in it.
  • C - Okay, give me a few minutes to make a decision.
Cloned From: 
Quotes Written In My 2004 Journal