"Independence is an achievement. Interdependence is a choice only independent people can make."
--Stephen R. Covey

it's better than inertia

"Mistakes are a part of being human. Appreciate your mistakes for what they are: precious life lessons that can only be learned the hard way. Unless it's a fatal mistake, which, at least, others can learn from."
--Al Franken

starchy

"It is hard to be reckless and still have one's shirts starched."
--Caitlin Macy, The Fundamentals of Play

invisible

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."
--Virginia Woolf

mini feasts

"What's agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn't care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you ... You look up from reading the newspaper and realize that no one loves you, and no one burns for you. The workings of nature are mysterious, but they do account for a certain amount of despair among single persons, the irrelevance you sometimes feel."
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"Passion occupies a space that is not vacated until another passion occupies it."
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"One of the lyrical consolations of insomnia is that the sufferer becomes acquainted with the special luminous emptiness of 4 a.m., these spectral stirrings when, just before dawn, the spirits seem to be abroad and are moving slowly toward you for reassurance ... Not all insomnias are alike, as any victim of this condition knows very well."
--Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love

imitation

"The story was like an imitation of something literary, made by someone who hadn't developed a distinctive voice of his own."
--Meg Wolitzer, The Wife

darkness and light

"... the central reason why books have meant so much to me. It is not because of my pleasure in the art of writing, though that has been very great. It is because they have taken me so far beyond the narrow limits of my own experience and have so greatly enlarged my sense of the complexity of life: of its consuming darkness, and also--thank God--of the light which continues to struggle through."
--Diana Athill, Stet: An Editor's Life

know the right word

"Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule."
--Stephen King

bad numbers

"It’s the rare individual who, at the age of eighteen, knows very much about the world or even herself."
--Margaret Heffernan

cover it in sequins

"I must say, I've fallen in love with the musical genre. It's the art form of the common man. If you want to communicate something to the proletariat, cover it in sequins and make it sing. It's noisy, vulgar, and utterly meaningless. I love it."
--Slings and Arrows

pseudointellectualism

"Nothing can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own."
--Sidney J. Harris

steamy victorians

Interviewer: "Put a handsome bloke in a period costume and his popularity rating goes off the scale. What's that about?"

Suppression. Not being able to touch someone, or say what you feel, because it's inappropriate. That tightens the sexual tension. You want to metaphorically rip off the corset! We don't think twice about such stuff nowadays. Anything goes in our society.
--Richard Armitage, North and South hottie

chef's special

"Skills can be taught. Character you either have or you don't have ... there are two kinds of people in this world: those who do what they say they're going to do -- and everyone else."
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"Assume the worst. About everybody. But don't let this poisoned outlook affect your job performance. Let it all roll off your back. Ignore it. Be amused by what you see and suspect. Just because someone you work with is a miserable, treacherous, self-serving, capricious, and corrupt asshole shouldn't prevent you from enjoying his company, working with him or finding him entertaining. This business grows assholes: it's our principal export. I'm an asshole. You should probably be an asshole, too."
--Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

another thousand days

"Right now all I know is that in love there must be some form of desperation and some form of joy. Both these sensations -- along with whatever else the lovers invent or permit -- are constants. Lovers are never long without one or the other or both of them. Is the joy fuller through the desperation, as it is to eat when you've been very hungry, to sleep when you've been awake too long? And if it is, shouldn't we welcome the despair as much as the joy? The giving, the getting, the taking, the nurturing, I have begun to understand that we take turns signing on for one or another of these as though they were daily jobs. We continue to assume jobs until all of them are filled, until all roles established. The dynamic part of love lies within each of these jobs but rarely beyond it. Consider, too, that love transforms the lovers."
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"Did you know it's defiance that keeps a man optimistic? Without his secrets, his rebellions, his little vendettas against another man or against the same wild hare who eludes him three days in a row, against hunger, against time itself -- if he loses these, he loses his voice."
--Marlena de Blasi, A Thousand Days in Tuscany

literary decor

"I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves."
--Anna Quindlen

the accidential venetian

"In those solitary evenings by my fire I found finely spun threads, a pattern, my own story. I opened up the kind of memory that feels like a wistful hankering for something lost or something that never was. I think most of us have it, this potentially destructive habit of mental record-keeping that builds, distorts, then breaks up and spreads into even the farthest flung territories of reason and consciousness. What we do is accumulate the pain, collect it like cranberry glass. We display it, stack it up into a pile. Then we stack it up into a mountain so we can climb up onto it, waiting for, demanding sympathy, salvation. 'Hey, do you see this? Do you see how big my pain is?' We look across at other people's piles and measure them, shouting, 'My pain is bigger than your pain.' It's all somehow like the medieval penchant for tower building. Each family demonstrated its power with the height of its own personal tower. One more layer of stone, one more layer of pain, each one a measure of power."
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"Whether we call it controlling or enabling or the more poetic 'taming,' power issues don't rear up as frenzied in a marriage between older people, the riper souls understanding these maneuvers to be ruinous. Older people get married for different reasons than younger people do. Perhaps it's that in a younger partnership, the man lives on his side of the marriage and the woman on hers. Gracious opponents in competitions over career, social and economic status, frequency and intensity of applause, they meet at table or in bed, each exhausted from the solitary race. In a later marriage, even if they work on different things, they're still working as a team, remembering that being together was why they got married in the first place. I look at Fernando, and I can't imagine not remembering that."
--Marlena De Blasi, A Thousand Days in Venice

master is slave

"Henry had always said that he wanted to be a better master than any white man he had ever known. He did not understand that the kind of world he wanted to create was doomed before he had even spoken the first syllable of the word master."
--Edward P. Jones, The Known World

running

All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.
--James Thurber

brain nutrients

"It is no more necessary that a man should remember the different dinners and suppers which have made him healthy, than the different books which have made him wise. Let us see the results of good food in a strong body, and the results of great reading in a full and powerful mind."
-- Sydney Smith

mrs rochester burns the house down

"I waited a long time after I heard her snore, then I got up, took the keys and unlocked the door. I was outside holding my candle. Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do. There must have been a draught for the flame flickered and I thought it was out. But I shielded it with my hand and it burned up again to light me along the passage."
--Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

the documentary age

"When we say a thing or an event is real, never mind how suspect it sounds, we honor it. But when a thing is made up -- regardless of how true and just it seems -- we turn up our noses. That's the age we live in. The documentary age. As if we can never, never get enough facts. We put on the television set and what we hear is the life cycles of birds. The replaying of wars. Interviews with mass murderers. And the newspapers know nothing else.
--Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

missing the point

"Now there's a woman who made a terrific meatloaf, who knew how to repot a drooping rubber plant, who bid a smart no-trump hand, who wore a hat well, who looked after her personal hygiene, who wrote her thank-you notes promptly, who kept up, who went down, went down and down and down, who missed the point, the point of it all, but was, nevertheless, almost unfailingly courteous to others."
--Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

unexpected delight

A week in Minneapolis, a more delightful city than I expected it to be:

My favorite destination(s):
Walker Art Center and Sculpture Garden
This was especially interesting.

Some great meals:
Bellanotte (I will remember this meal for a long time, especially the chocolate lava cake)
Chambers Kitchen
New Delhi (the only meal to slightly disappoint, probably because it was lunch buffet)
Hell's Kitchen (ham and pear grilled sandwich -- yum!)

ticking off

"I loathe the expression 'What makes him tick.' It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm."
--James Thurber

gems from housekeeping

"When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate."
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"It is ... difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows."
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"Every spirit passing through the world fingers the tangible and mars the mutable, and finally has to look and not to buy."
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"I learned an important thing in the orchard that night, which was that if you do not resist the cold, but simply relax and accept it, you no longer feel the cold as discomfort."
-- Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

why didn't I think of that?

"I am returning this otherwise good typing paper to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the top."
--An English Professor

losing sight

"Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles."
--George Jean Nathan

the sane response

"Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane."
-- Philip K. Dick

what will we say? what will we do?

"What shall we say when history asks how such crimes came to be committed in the name of America? Will we say that we stood silently by, shrugging our shoulders, filling our bellies, closing our eyes? Or will we be able to say: We saw. We dissented. We resisted. We condemned."
-- Chris Floyd

reading about reading

So, you think you know how to read?

night is another thing

"It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing."
--Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

and so I become a homeowner

The architect's vision of my new townhouse, done in May. Hooray! Renter no more!

freaks

" ... we have that word normal and we can say we are normal because a psychological, sexual, or spiritual abnormality can -- with a little luck -- be safely hidden from the rest of the world. But if you are less than three feet tall, you have to deal with that fact every second of every day of your life. And everyone witnesses your effort. You go into a bar and you can't get up onto a stool. You whistle down a taxi and you can't open the door. If you're a lady with a beard, every face you meet is a mirror to give you back the disgust and horror and unreasonableness of your predicament. No matter which corner you turn on which street in which city in the world, you can expect to meet the mirror. And I suppose I have never been able to forgive myself the grotesqueries and aberrations I am able to hide with such impunity in my own life. It was a painful and wondrous moment of self-knowledge, one I might never have had if I had not taken the bike on the road, looking for something I knew I'd recognize only when I saw it, looking for the limit -- ultimately, looking for the edge."
-- Harry Crews, Introduction to A Harry Crews Reader

stepping out

"The only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step out of the frame."
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"Disorientation is the loss of the East. Ask any navigator: the East is what you sail by. Lose the east and you lose your bearings, your certainties, your knowledge of what is and what may be, perhaps even your life ... But let's just suppose. What if the whole deal -- orientation, knowing where you are, and so on -- what if it's all a scam? What if all of it -- home, kinship, the whole enchilada -- is just the biggest, most truly global, and centuries-oldest piece of brainwashing? Suppose that it's only when you dare to let go that your real life begins? When you're whirling free of the mother ship, when you cut your ropes, slip your chain, step off the map, go absent without leave, scram, vamoose, whatever: suppose that it's then, and only then, that you're actually free to act! To lead the life nobody tells you how to live, or when, or why. In which nobody orders you to go forth and die for them, or for god, or comes to get you because you broke one of the rules, or because you're one of those people who are, for reasons which unfortunately you can't be given, simply not allowed. Suppose you've got to go through the feeling of being lost, into the chaos and beyond; you've got to accept the loneliness, the wild panic of losing your moorings, the vertiginous terror of the horizon spinning round and round like the edge of a coin tossed in the air.
You won't do it. Most of you won't do it. The world's head laundry is pretty good at washing brains: Don't jump off that cliff don't walk through that door don't step into that waterfall don't take that chance don't step across that line don't ruffle my sensitivities I'm warning you now don't make me mad you're doing it you're making mad. You won't have a chance you haven't got a prayer you're finished you're history you're less than nothing, you're dead to me, dead to your whole family your nation your race, everything you ought to love more than life and listen to like your master's voice and follow blindly and bow down before and worship and obey; you're dead, you hear me, forget about it, you stupid bastard, I don't even know your name."
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Can you hear in my voice that I'm angry? Good. I've been reading a book about anger. It says that anger is evidence of our idealism. Something has gone wrong, but we 'know,' in our rage, that things could be different. It shouldn't be this way.
--Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

favorites of 2006

Books:
Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
Barney's Version, Mordecai Richler
Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, Brady Udall
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
Ash Wednesday, Ethan Hawke

Movies:
Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus
A Very Long Engagement
Little Miss Sunshine
Capote

And two exceptional TV series, because watching them on DVD was more enjoyable than most of the movies I saw this year:
The West Wing (whole series)
Slings & Arrows (Seasons 1 and 2)