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You need a decoder ring to keep your mind right.

James Kunstler

Whatever it is I say I said or did, because they said I didn’t say or do it – by virtue of my belief – becomes what they said I said or did. The more I say I hadn’t said what’s said I’m meant to have said, the more compelling becomes the evidence I did. I might as well have not said or done what I said I said or did. I might have well said or done instead what they said, even if I hadn’t.

eva saltsman

Always be beginning, always be choosing, never just following along by rote.

hex 63>40

When people ask, I want a word that means okay and not okay, more than that: a word that means devastated and stunned with joy. I want the word that says I feel it all, all at once.

rosemary wahtola trommer

An elementary school teacher was giving a drawing class to a group of six year-old children. At the back of the classroom sat a little girl who normally didn’t pay much attention in school, but in the drawing class, she did. For more than twenty minutes, the girl sat with her arms curled around her paper, totally absorbed in what she was doing. The teacher found this fascinating. Eventually, she asked the girl what she was drawing. Without looking up, the girl said ‘Im drawing a picture of God.’ Surprised, the teacher said, ‘but nobody knows what God looks like.’ The girl said, ‘they will in a minute.’

ken robinson, the element

In fact, it’s a growing conviction that the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement with truth. Single biggest influence on what a body will or won’t believe is what nearby bodies broadcast over the public band. Get three people in the room and they’ll decide that the law of gravity is evil and should be rescinded because one of their uncles got shit-faced and fell off the roof.

richard powers, overstory

The store was a riot of colour. Every corner had multiple layers of stuff, so you couldn’t put your eye down on one thing without it landing on five more: golden silk handkerchiefs, tallboy cabinets draped ropey silken tassels, iridescent velvet slippers, a bristly thick, glossy black lancelet fur capelet, gumdrop earrings that might have been rhinestones or Tiffany. The accessories had their own accessories: there were fancy opera glasses, each with an eyeglasses chain on which dangled an opera-glasses charm. My molars ached.

adrienne rappel

Everybody’s born with some different thing at the core of their existence. And that thing, whatever it is, becomes like a heat source that runs each person from the inside. I have one too, of course. Like everybody else. But sometimes it gets out of hand. It swells or shrinks inside me and it shakes me up. What I’d really like to do is find a way to communicate that feeling to another person. But I can’t seem to do it. They just don’t get it. Of course, the problem could be that I’m not explaining it very well, but I think it’s because they’re not listening very well. They pretend to be listening, but they’re not, really.

haruki Murakami, the wind-up bird chronicle

Purple sadness is the sadness of classical music and eggplant, the stroke of midnight, human organs, ports cut off for part of every year, words with too many meanings, incense, insomnia, and the crescent moon. It is the sadness of play money, and icebergs seen from a canoe. It is possible to dance to purple sadness, through slowly, as slowly as it takes to dig a pit to hold a sleeping giant. Purple sadness is pervasive, and goes deeper into the interior than the world’s greatest nickel deposits, or any other sadness on earth. It is the sadness of depositories, and heels echoing down a long corridor. It is the sound of your mother closing the door at night, leaving you alone.

mary ruefle, my private property

Note: the author shares, if you substitute the word happiness for the word sadness, nothing changes.

All roses are flowers. Some flowers fade quickly. Therefore some roses fade quickly. A large majority of college students endorse this syllogism as valid. But the argument is flawed, because it is possible that there are no roses among the flowers that fade quickly.

daniel kahneman