People often ask me where they might go to find adventure.
Adventure is not something you must travel to find, I tell them,
it’s something you take with you.
Diane Ackerman, “Worlds Within Worlds,” The New York Times
When I was younger, I thought I could change this world.
Now I no longer think so but for emotional reasons
I must keep on fighting a holding action.
Robert Heinlein, Friday
If there is a God, I don't think He would demand that anybody bow down or stand up to Him.
I have often a suspicion God is still trying to work things out and hasn't finished.
Rebecca West, interview in The Paris Review
Praise the spells and bless the charms,
I found April in my arms.
April golden, April cloudy,
Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy;
April soft in flowered languor,
April cold with sudden anger,
Ever changing, ever true —
I love April, I love you.
Ogden Nash
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been.
The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread
winding its way through our political and cultural life,
nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that
“my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
Isaac Asimov, “A Cult of Ignorance,” Newsweek magazine 1980
The important thing is to know how to take all things quietly.
Michael Faraday, Treasury of the Christian Faith, Stuber and Clark
There’s birth, there’s death,
and in between there’s maintenance.
Tom Robbins, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates