Wednesday Words

"The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned."

"When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."

"Have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time." 

-Maya Angelou

Wednesday Words

"By 30, a writer's vitality is gone, and his unique vision with it. Anything he's got to say about the world has to be seen through his youth, his unjaded--or less jaded--eyes."

-F. Scott Fitzgerald in Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Ann Fowler

Wednesday Words

"You have to stop acting like a lunatic."

-Don Draper, Mad Men

Wednesday Words

“There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.” 

-Anaïs Nin

Wednesday Words (on a Friday)

"The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for."

-Maureen Dowd

Wednesday Words

Only need the light when it's burning low 

Only miss the sun when it starts to snow 

Only know you love her when you let her go 

Only know you've been high when you're feeling low 

Only hate the road when you're missin' home

Only know you love her when you let her go

-"Let Her Go" by Passenger

This is one of those songs that, within a day of buying, was second on my most played list. I just love it. It sticks with me, though, because I'm opposite of what it's portraying. When it's snowing I don't think it will ever be sunny again, and when I'm feeling low I can't remember what it's like to feel high. I don't know which way is better.

Wednesday Words

"When do the things we once wanted more than life itself, get replaced, by life itself?" 

-Jan W., in a Gchat conversation with me

Wednesday Words

"For the impenetrable prison with the impossible lock is your own head."

-Marisha Pessl, "Night Film"

Wednesday Words

"'How easy it is to feel the goodness of God on such a day?' he whispered. 'Sometimes I wonder why we shut ourselves up in churches. What can man make, after all, that evokes the Divine as a place such as this?'"

-Geraldine Brooks, "Year of Wonders"

Wednesday Words

“The mind of a writer can be a truly terrifying thing. Isolated, neurotic, caffeine-addled, crippled by procrastination and consumed by feelings of panic, self-loathing and soul-crushing inadequacy. And that’s on a good day.” 

-Robert DeNiro, 2014 Academy Awards

Wednesday Words

"As you get older you find out the place where you started out pulls at you stronger and stronger."

-The Shipping News, Annie Proulx

Wednesday Words

"Quiet people have the loudest minds."

-Stephen Hawking

Wednesday Words

"A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image." 

-Joan Didion, "The White Album" 

I'm on a deadline at work that is consuming me so please forgive the lack of blogging. I have lots to say, but if it's not on intelligent compaction of pavement, I don't have the time or energy to say it.

Wednesday Words

"I see the creative process as a necessarily thievish undertaking. Dig beneath a beautiful piece of writing, Monsuier Boustouler, and you will find all manner of dishonor. Creating means vandalizing the lives of other people, turning them into unwilling and unwitting participants. You steal their desires, their dreams, pocket their flaws, their suffering. You take what does not belong to you. You do this knowingly."

-Khaled Hosseini, "And the Mountains Echoed"

Wednesday Words

"It would just make my heart soar if someone out there saw this, and she said to herself, 'Be strong, trust yourself, love yourself, conquer your fears, just go after what you want. And act fact, because life just isn't that long.'

There's a lot of beauty in ordinary things.
Isn't that kind of the point? "

-Pam Beasley Halpert, "The Office" series finale

Wednesday Words

Scene: A small group of us were leaving the office to get yogurt

Background: At a group lunch the day before, I had knocked over a water glass

Co-worker 1: Be careful, Bonnie!

Co-worker 2: Why?

Co-worker 3: It's really just best practice to always say that to Bonnie.

Wednesday Words

"The people don't like to be conquered, sir, and so they will not be. Free men cannot start a war, but once it is started, they can fight on in defeat. Herd men, followers of a leader, cannot do that, and so it is always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars. You will find that is so, sir."

-John Steinbeck, The Moon is Down

Wednesday Words

"I’ll wait for you. Come back. The words were not meaningless, but they didn’t touch him now. It was clear enough -- one person waiting for another was like an arithmetical sum, and just as empty of emotion. Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached. Waiting was a heavy word.” 

-Ian McEwan, Atonement

Wednesday Words

"Please do not be cynical. I hate cynicism. For the record, it's my least favorite quality. It doesn't lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen. I'm telling you. Amazing things will happen. I'm telling you. It's just true." 

-Conan O'Brien, Tonite Show Farewell

Wednesday Words

"I don't want formal and easy and simple. I want painful, difficult, devastating, life-changing, extraordinary love."

-Olivia Pope, Scandal

She had an affair with the president so I'll say she's accomplished all of this. And all whilst wearing the most fabulous coats.