--JUST TURN UP THE MUSIC AND HOLD MY HAND

…Well, it’s been quite a day—I got my ass kicked in shuffleboard, the stock market dropped more than 200 points, and James Galdofini died.  It’s got to get better, right?

…Me, I’m heading to a bubble bath with a book, but I’ll leave you with these:

"This life we have is short, so let us leave a mark for people to remember." - Kip Keino, Kenyan Olympic Gold Medalist in Track, explaining why he adopted and educated 69 orphan children.

"Until one is committed, there is always hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one element of truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans - that moment one commits oneself, then providence moves all." Goethe

"Do what you can where you are with what you've got." Theodore Roosevelt

"This frenzy/like bees stinging the heart all morning." Anne Sexton

"I was told over and over again that I would never be successful, that I was not going to be competitive and the technique was simply not going to work. All I could do was shrug and say 'We'll just have to see.'" Dick Fosbury, who won an Olympic gold medal at the 1968 Mexico games after he invented a revolutionary high-jump technique.

"If you dance around a cauliflower, every now and then, from certain angles, and in the right light, it will look like the sun." Paulo Coelho

"I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade." James Stockdale Commenting on his 8 years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, during which he was tortured over 20 times.

"We write to say there is no them. There is only us." Luis Alberto Urrea

"The greatest virtue in the world is action." Nick McDonell, "The Third Brother"

"The job of a writer is to vanquish mess-to wade onto the seething porch of actuality, pick out a few elements with which to make a story, and consign the rest to the garbage dump." Janet Malcolm

“I would quit while you’re ahead. Really. It’s an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and you write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it’s not any good. I would say just stop now. You don’t want to do this to yourself. That’s my advice to you.”  Phillip Roth (I think he was being sarcastic.  I hope he was anyway.)

"Writers are very often miserable people: some thrive on unhappiness, others don’t. But few are immune from feelings of deep and avid dissatisfaction. We write because we are constantly discontented with almost everything, and need to use words to rearrange it, all of it, and set the record straight." Avi Steinberg

"Joining, in other words, happens through a process of opposition, irony, and dissent. If you’re going to join a messed-up club, you have to pass the messed-up entrance exam. You enter into the sect only when you push back, when you finally say, Listen, I don’t care what you tell me. I know it’s a bad idea, but I’m determined to do it, and I will do it.

“There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I'd like to know. I wish someone could tell me.”
―Raymond Carver, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"