Gleanings from My Readings

“I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.”
---Jane Austen, in Northanger Abbey

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“Reading from a monitor, instead of a book, is like playing videogame football instead of tossing a football around.”
---Roy Blount, Jr., in Alphabet Juice

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“It’s magic to see Spirit, largely because it’s so rare. Mostly you see the masks and the holograms that the culture presents as real. You see how you’re doing in the world’s eyes, or your family’s, or—worst of all—yours, or in the eyes of people who are doing better than you—much better than you—or worse. But you are not your bank account, or your ambition. You’re not the cold clay lump you leave behind when you die. You’re not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are Spirit, you are love, and even though it is hard to believe sometimes, you are free. You’re here to love, and be loved, freely. If you find out next week that you are terminally ill—and we’re all terminally ill on this bus—what will matter are memories of beauty, that people loved you, and that you loved them.”
---Anne Lamott, in Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

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“Highly credible people make decisions to ‘suspend judgment’ when considering another person’s perspective. They do this because they are okay with being wrong—or, at bare minimum, okay with having their opinions challenged. This doesn’t mean they don’t have passion and strong beliefs. It simply means that their minds are open to other opinions, even if those are quite different from their own.”
---Sandy Allgeier, in The Personal Credibility Factor

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“Hillary’s campaign illustrates how far we’ve come, and how far we haven’t come. The tone and tenor of the debates around Hillary, and around Sarah Palin, was far more personal and mocking than toward their male counterparts. Maybe the material was richer, but there was no attempt to dance around gender issues the way there is with race. As a society, we still condone sexism; we view it as a part of nature, a given that isn’t worth bothering our pretty heads about.”
---Eleanor Clift, in “Suffrage, Hillary Style,” Newsweek 1/27/09 Commemorative Inaugural Edition

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Happy Reading!