Orwell wrote easily and well about small humane pursuits, such as bird watching, gardening and cooking, and did not despise popular pleasures like pubs and vulgar seaside resorts. In many ways, his investigations into ordinary life and activity prefi...
Who are we, who is each one of us if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things we have imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly s...
My purpose of life is sweet indeed. I like to help people when in need. I am longing for happiness. I am expressing my kindness. I am expressing my love every day. I am compassionate all the way.
I saw the horrible way that people could treat each other. That may be the saddest thing of all. I saw greed and anger and murder and a total lack of concern for human life. It was a wicked side of the human soul that I saw... and it saddened me to k...
I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without ...
If non-linear leaps in intelligence and ability are possible, why haven't these effects been observed in our schools? I believe the answer lies in the profound inertia of human thought: when an entire society believes something is impossible, it supp...
The art of living is to fall in love over and over again. It is no easy thing to walk through the world with an open heart, embracing everything, and also stand true, allowing no poison to infect us. But be cracked open often. Pour yourself into life...
One of the ironies of college is that the impossibility of reading your way out of the modern predicament is something you learn about, as a student, by reading. Part of the value of a humanistic education has to do with a consciousness of, and a fam...
Instead of educating the I.Q., we need to educate the H.Q., the heart quotient, the matters of truth, love, justice, and compassion. There are two ways to do this. One is through the read life experiences and the other is through literature. Literatu...
When you have lived your life under such dominant image-leadership, its pressures put a certain invisible English on the cue ball of your development: It influences all of your ideas about who you should be, all the ways in which you become yourself.
Life is made up of a few moments all strung together like pearls. Each moment is a pearl, and it is up to us to pick the ones with the highest luster. If we do not have time to do great things, take a few gentle moments and do small things in a great...
Queens is so often treated as a stepchild and labeled as an outer borough. At the very least, if I could help bring more attention to what we need, and what the federal government needs to do to improve the quality of life of people right here in Que...
Life-writing calls for any number of dubious gifts: A touch of O.C.D., a lack of imagination, a large desk, neutrality of Swiss proportions, tactlessness, a high tolerance for archival dust. Most of all it calls for an act of displacement. 'To find y...
Pachanga: Carlito man, it's Death Valley out here man... you know me, I'll take to the streets with any of these motherfuckers man, but these new kids now days, they got no respect for human life. They shotgun you just to see you fly in the air.
Mickey: And Nietzsche, with his theory of eternal recurrence. He said that the life we lived we're gonna live over again the exact same way for eternity. Great. That means I'll have to sit through the Ice Capades again.
Brian: [Brian is in a prison cell with Ben who is hanging from chains] Oh lay off, I've had a hard time! Ben the Prisoner: You've had a hard time? I've been here five years, they only hung me the right way up yesterday.
Kermit the Frog: It's all right, children. Life is made up of meetings and partings. That is the way of it. I am sure that we shall never forget Tiny Tim, or this first parting that there was among us.
Gale: You understand, H.I.? If this works out, it's just the beginning of a spree to cover the entire southwest proper. And we keep going until we can retire. Or we get caught. Evelle: Either way, we're fixed for life.
Sheryl Yoast: In Virginia, high school football is a way of life, it's bigger than Christmas day. My daddy coached in Alexandria, he worked so hard my momma left him, but I stayed with coach, he needed me on that field.
Don’t fail through defects of temper and over-sensitiveness at moments of trial. One of the great helps to success is to be cheerful; to go to work with a full sense of life; to be determined to put hindrances out of the way; to prevail over them a...
Life is just so interesting and complicated and beautiful. Every day, every interaction is different. There’s so much floating around that I would find it really hard to get bored. I’m interested in creating in some way or another, whether it’s...