Power, used well, should be empowering, contagious, and creative.
It should be collaborative, enabling, and protective.
It should be self-critical, curious, and brave.
It should know its own limits and be prepared to risk its own reputation.
This kind of power asks questions to which it does not know the answers
and listens because in listening is learning, and in learning is life.
Padraig O'Tuama, In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World
When I eat my dinner I don’t do it to the greater glory of God; I do it because I enjoy it.
The world’s full of amusing things—books, wine, travel, friends—everything.
I’ve never seen any meaning in it all, and I don’t want to see one.
Why not take life as you find it?
George Orwell, A Clergyman’s Daughter
Carlyle remarked: “The population of England is twenty millions, mostly fools.”
Everybody who read this considered himself one of the exceptions, and therefore enjoyed the remark.
Bertrand Russell, How to Become a Man of Genius
The Upper West Side is the part of Manhattan I like best;
it has the excitement and pace of the city,
but with the feel of a real neighborhood.
Just by walking on the street you know that real life is being lived there.
David Rosenfelt, New Tricks
The tomato hides its griefs.
Internal damage is hard to spot.
Julia Child, Julia Child & Company
Any religion is a shadow of God.
But the shadows of God are not God.
Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood
Some of us have done it since our twenties
when our hair turned white on the death of a loved one
or it ran in the family like baldness, and some of us
spray red or purple on shaved stubble,
and others have let it creep up on us,
counting the odd hair, then the fifth, the fiftieth,
till our teenagers point out how old we’re getting
but our lovers who hate anything artificial
like make-up and sequins, though they accept
icecream and the Pill, say we shouldn’t bother,
so we steal home from Boots with the ColorGlo
and lock ourselves in the bathroom in rubber gloves,
emerge an hour later ten years younger
with a smart grey streak over one temple
and mahogany smudges round the jaw line.
And when the roots start to show we carelessly
pop into the hairdresser and book a colour
which means a cut and finish and takes all morning
so we can catch up on our reading, extending
our knowledge of the stars and multiple orgasm,
but we have to go every six weeks or it starts to fade
and by now the local firm is turning our hair to hay
so we find a better one at fifty quid a splash,
a rollercoaster we can’t get off of,
and we decide to let it all grow out and be our age
which isn’t a hundred and five but might as well be.
Janet Fisher