inertial well-being

"Whatever the reasons for the inertia of our well-being, what is clear is that if we are to change our typical level of happiness, it will not be through quick fixes or one-shot interventions. We will need to change permanently our lives and our lifestyles, just as if we were trying to change our weight or level of aerobic fitness." -Christopher Peterson

excess

"It is more rewarding to be complicit with scarcity than excess." -Will Oldham

words

"I don't care much about pretty words any more. You live with words a long time. Then all at once you are old, and there are the things and the words don't matter any more." -Judge Irwin in Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men

Stoppard

I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
-Tom Stoppard

Steinbeck

Guy don't need no sense to be a nice fella. Seems to me sometimes it jus' works the other way around. Take a real smart guy and he ain't hardly ever a nice fella.
-Slim in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men

Hardy

"...the more I see of life the more do I perceive that there is nothing particularly great in its greatest walks, and therefore nothing particularly small in mine..."
-Clym Yeobright in Thomas Hardy's Return of The Native

Steinbeck

Guy don't need no sense to be a nice fella.
-Slim, in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men

Plath

"They understood things of the spirit in Japan. They disemboweled themselves when anything went wrong."
-Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar

Hemingway

"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
- Ernest Hemingway, author and journalist, Nobel laureate (1899-1961)

Callahan

It's which came first, the phoenix or the ashes?
-Bill Callahan, (Smog), in the 07/02/07 Pitchfork interview

Pauling

"Do unto others 20% better than you would expect them to do unto you, to correct for subjective error." -Linus Pauling (1962)

Juvenal

Probitas laudatur et alget.

O'Connor

"I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted" -Flanner O'Connor (From "Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose," 1961)

Barrett Browning

"The beautiful seems right / By force of Beauty, and the feeble wrong / Because of weakness."
-Elizabeth Barret Browning

Albee

"If you're willing to fail interestingly, you tend to succeed interestingly."
-Edward Albee

Kostoglotov (Solzhenitsyn)

"'An evil man threw tobacco in the macaque-rhesus eyes.' Oleg was struck dumb. Up to then he had been strolling along smiling with knowing condescension, but now he felt like yelling and roaring across the whole zoo, as though the tobacco had been thrown into his own eyes. 'Why?' Thrown into its eyes, just like that! 'Why? It's senseless! Why?'" - Kostoglotov in Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward

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