ONLY WORDS ENDURE 
(Barbara Florio Graham)

(NOTE: Many of the unattributed quotations are from The Prairie Rambler)

We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
(Aristotle)

When you get to the end of the rope, tie a knot and hang on.
(Franklin D Roosevelt)

Envy is the art of counting the other fellow’s blessings instead of your own.
(Harold Coffin)

For attractive lips, speak words of kindness.
For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people.
For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry.
For beautiful hair, let a child run his or her fingers through it once a day.
For poise, walk with the knowledge you'll never walk alone.
(Audrey Hepburn)

The space between anxiety and boredom is where creativity flourishes.

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, 
and the fitting of them together, 
like the fitting of stones, 
          demands great patience, strength of purpose, 
              and particular skill.
             (Edmund Morrison)

Worry: interest paid by those who borrow trouble.
(Thomas Jefferson, quoted in The Worrywart's Prayer Book)

Make the least of what goes
and the most of what comes.

Most of the shadows of this life are caused by our standing in our own sunshine.
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Life is pretty simple: 
You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works.
You do more of what works.
(Thomas J. Peters)

If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.
(Thomas Watson, a pioneer at IBM)

 The road to success is always under construction.
Lily Tomlin.

It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer.
(Albert Einstein) 

 An education isn't how much you have committed to memory,
or even how much you know.
It's being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don't.
(Anatole France)

Almost all new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.
(Alfred North Whitehead)

There was never a good war or a bad peace.
(Benjamin Franklin)

 From Lakshmi Sundaram:
Think before you add fuel to a fire. How large are you willing to have that fire become? 
and
We react to what we recognize and judge what we are afraid of. 

Pay attention to where you spend your energy. 
If you put your energy into fishing, then regardless of how you earn your living, 
you will be a fisherman.

If you want a kitten, start out by asking for a horse. 
(Naomi, age 15, writing in Kid's Instructions for Smart Living.)

When information is brushed up against information, the results are startling and effective.
(Marshall McLuhan)

If at first you don’t succeed, you are running about average. 
(M.H. Alderson)

Writing isn't a big thing. It's a million little things. 
(Roberta Beach Jacobson, author and humorist) 

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, 
but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. 
(Martin Luther King, Jr.)

We are so vain that we even care for the opinion of those we don't care for.
(Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach)

Try not to become a man of success
but a man of value.
(Albert Einstein)

When you were born, you cried and the world rejoiced.
 Live your life so that when you die, the world cries and you rejoice.
(Cherokee proverb)

The art of living is to enjoy what we can see and not complain about what remains in the dark.
 (Henri J. M. Nouwen)

Making the simple complicated is commonplace;
making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.
(Charles Mingus, jazz musician) 

Having intelligence is not as important
as knowing when to use it,
just as having a hoe 
is not as important as knowing when to plant.
(Chinese proverb)

In our instant pudding world, everything is sweet, smooth, very convenient and fast.
There are lots of assorted flavors, but they're all artificial.
(wildlife artist Robert Bateman)

How far that little candle throws his beam!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
(Shakespeare)

If you've experienced zero, every tiny gain is a triumph.
(Barbara Florio Graham)

When facing a difficult task, act as though it is impossible to fail.
If you're going after Moby Dick, take along the tartar sauce. 
(H. Jackson Brown, Jr.)

There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.
(Leonard Cohen)

Cats are so unpredictable: you just never know how they’ll ignore you next. 
(Saba Design)

I write down everything I want to remember.
That way, instead of spending a lot of time trying
to remember what it is I wrote down,
I spend the time looking for the paper I wrote it down on.
(Beryl Pfizer)

Two paradoxes are better than one; they may even suggest a solution.
 (physicist Edward Teller)

Ask "why" until there is no more "why." 
(actress Laura Linney, about how she prepares for a role)

The future belongs to those who see possibilities before they become obvious.
(John Sculley, former CEO of Apple)

There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told.
(Edgar Allan Poe)

Online journalism has rendered us all news wire hacks – 
get it posted fast, forget about context or nuance or interpretation,
 and errors will be fixed on the fly.
(Rosie DiManno in The Toronto Star)

Welcome to the future of journalism:
No training, no ethics, no law, no mores, few skills.
Simply journalism by the mob...and a subculture on the Internet...
(Ken Gray, in his blog: www.ottawacitizen.com/bulldog)

I would trust a citizen journalist as much as I would trust a citizen surgeon. 
(Morley Safer, 60 Minutes)

Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart.
Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.
(psychologist Carl Jung)

But words are things, and a small drop of ink, 
Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.
(George Gordon Byron)

   Words need to be crafted, not sprayed.
They need to be fitted together with infinite care.
(Norman Cousins)

Leave out the parts that readers tend to skip. 
(Elmore Leonard)

Books are the carriers of civilization. 
Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, 
science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. 
(Henry David Thoreau)

 Words have a magical power. 
They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair; 
they can transfer knowledge from teacher to student; 
words enable the orator to sway his audience and dictate its decisions. 
Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men's actions.
(Sigmund Freud)  

The successful person has the habit of doing things failures dont like to do. 
They dont like doing them either necessarily. 
But their disliking is subordinated to the strength of their purpose.
Albert E. N. Gray

 Imagination is more important than knowledge. 
For knowledge is limited, 
whereas imagination embraces the entire world, 
stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. 
 (Albert Einstein)

 As for discipline it's important, but sort of over-rated.
The more important virtue for a writer, I believe, is self-forgiveness.
 Because your writing will always disappoint you. Your laziness will always disappoint you.
You will make vows: Im going to write for an hour every day, and then you wont do it.
You will think: I suck, Im such a failure. Im washed-up.
Continuing to write after that heartache of disappointment doesnt take only discipline,
but also self-forgiveness ...
The other thing to realize is that all writers think they suck...
The point I realized was this:
 I never promised the universe that I would write brilliantly;
I only promised the universe that I would write.
So I put my head down and sweated through it, as per my vows.
(Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat. Pray.Love):

A mind, once expanded by a new idea,  never returns to its original dimensions. 
    (Oliver Wendell Holmes)

Words, like glasses, obscure everything they do not make clear.   (Joseph Joubert - 1754–1824)

       Put it before them briefly so they will read it,
             clearly so they will appreciate it, 
          picturesquely so they will remember it and, 
             above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light. 
             (Joseph Pulitzer)

The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
 (Finley Peter Dunne, a Chicago-based humorist, 
whose column was one of the first nationally syndicated newspaper features)

Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.  (WilliamShakespeare)

Often success brings arrogance and complacency.

You make a living by what you get.
You make a life by what you give.
(Winston Churchill)

      Life is like a snowball. The really important thing is to finding wet snow and a really long hill.                                                                          (Warren Buffett)

                One of the secrets of life is to make stepping stones out of stumbling blocks.  (Jack Penn)

We have met the enemy and he is us  (Walt Kelly's character, Pogo)

Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, 
but rather to skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and proclaiming, "What a ride!"
(author unknown)

In books, I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.
I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to,
and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself.
(Anna Quindlen, Barnard, 1974)

A room without books is like a body without a soul.
(Marcus Tullius Cicero )

Reading aloud recaptures the physicality of words.
To read with your lungs and diaphragm, with your tongue and lips,
is very different than reading with your eyes alone.
The language becomes a part of the body,
which is why there is always a curious tenderness, almost an erotic quality,
in those 18th- and 19th-century literary scenes where a book is being read aloud in mixed company.
The words are not mere words.
They are the breath and mind, perhaps even the soul, of the person who is reading. 
(Verlyn Klinkenborg in the NY Times)   

Building a personal library is an exercise in autobiography.
We are known by the books we keep.
(Leonard Stern)

In Bernard Shaw's play, Man and Superman, Anna is dismayed to find that she's landed in Hell,
despite living a virtuous life.  She says,
If I'd known I was going to end up here, I would have been so much wickeder!

Like stones, words are laborious and unforgiving, 
and the fitting of them together, like the fitting of stones, 
demands great patience and strength of purpose and particular skill.    
(Edmund Morrison)

TheMoving Finger writes; and, having writ,
moves on: nor all thy Piety norWit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out aWord of it.
(Omar Khayyam, translated by Edward Fitzgerald)

Genius is a talented person who does his homework.  (Thomas Edison)

Bernhard Schlink, who wrote The Reader, comments on the Nazi mentality:
Once you step over the line, you have crossed a significant boundary and can never go back. 
From then on, continuing these transgressions is easy. 
This is how child soldiers are trained, with tiny progressions of cruelty.
The individual's moral sense is too weak to resist. 
Institutions like the church help strengthen morality.
In Germany, however, institutions were weak and insufficient to stand up to the state. 

I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. 
On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shotand missed. 
I have failed over and over again in my life. 
And that is why I succeed.  
(Michael Jordan)

The profound immoralities of our time are cruelty, indifference,
injustice and the use of others as means rather than ends in themselves.                      
Sydney J. Harris)

Sometimes our light goes out but is blown in flame by another human being.
Each of us owes deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this light.    (Albert Schweitzer)

Only when the last tree has died, and the last river been poisoned,
and the last fish been caught will we realize that we cannot eat money.  
(a Cree elder)

If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem will look like a nail.  (Abraham Maslow)

Just because the water is calm doesn't mean there aren't any crocodiles.  (Malayan proverb)

A compromise is an arrangement whereby someone who can't get exactly what he wants
 makes sure nobody else gets what they want.  (probably another by Jerry B. of The Prairie Rambler)

In the midst of great joy do not promise anyone anything.
In the midst of great anger, do not answer anyone's letter. 
(Chinese proverb)

 A man is not old until regrets take the place of dreams.  (John Barrymore)

I expect to pass through thisworld but once; 
any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellowcreature, 
et me do it now; let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.   
(Stephen Greliet - 1773–1855)

Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing; 
Only a signal shown and a distant voice in the darkness;
So on the ocean of life we pass and speak one another,
Only a look and a voice; then darkness again and a silence.
(HenryWadsworth Longfellow - 1807–1882)

When I use a word, it means what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less. [Humpty Dumpty]

Writing is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to those who have none. 
                                              (Jules Reynard - 1864–1910)

The seven root causes of evil, according to Mahatma Gandhi:
            wealth without work
            pleasure without consequence
            knowledge without character
            commerce without morality
            science without humanity 
            worship without sacrifice
            politics without principles

We're still trying to do the wrong things better than we did them before.  (John Carver)

An insincere and evil friend is more to be feared than a wild beast;
 a wild beast may wound your body, but an evil friend will wound your mind.
(Buddha)

You write to find out what you're writing (e.l. doctorow, who calls himself a graphomaniac because he writes all the time, about everything)  Doctorow also says he usually starts with an image, then writes to discover who these people are, and what's going on. He adds: When I was young, I knew a lot about writing. Now I just do it.

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. 
Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
The slogan Press On has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.   (Calvin Coolidge)

Four Traditional Native Virtues:  Courage, Strength, Wisdom, Generosity