From my home page:



August 2007: Answering machine message: A is for academics, B is for beer, and one of those reasons is why we�re not here.


April 2007: "Behind every successful woman ... is a basket of dirty laundry." - Sally Forth


January 2007: When my three-year-old son opened the birthday gift from his grandmother and found a water pistol, he squealed with delight and headed for the nearest sink. I was not so pleased. I turned to Mom and said, "I'm surprised at you. Don't you remember how we used to drive you crazy with water guns?" Mom smiled and then replied, "I remember."


July 2006:
"When I dare to be powerful--
to use my strength in the service of my vision,
then it becomes less important
whether I am afraid." - Audre Lorde


June 2006: "If nature had arranged that husbands and wives should have children alternately, there would never be more than three in a family." - Laurence Housman


April (and May) 2006: "Today has been an exhausting week." - Dennis


February 2006: "It was evident that the race had degenerated, like many a noble race besides, in consequence of too strict a watchfulness to keep it pure." - Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables


January 2006: Scott McCloud on sexism: "Outright discrimination may be harder to measure or prove in today's harassment-wary climate, but there are some genuine horror stories." (Reinventing Comics, 2000)


December 2005: "These names of gentleman and lady [...] imply, not privilege, but restriction." - Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables so.)


November 2005: "Is it possible to get a cup of coffee-flavored coffee anymore in this country? What happened with coffee? Did I miss a meeting? They have every other flavor but coffee-flavored coffee. They have mochaccino, frappaccino, cappuccino, Al Pacino.... Coffee doesn't need a menu, it needs a cup." - Denis Leary (I had just started really drinking coffee within the previous month or so.)


October 2005: "Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of children." - William Makepeace Thackeray


September 2005: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." -- Jesus - and Confucius, five hundred years earlier


August 2005: "Always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde


July 2005: "We want to believe that great artists will always find their destined careers, no matter what society tells them, but for many, ambition can be a delicate thing -- and finding the right road may not be possible, even for the brightest of imaginations -- when that road can't be found on any map."--Scott McCloud, Reinventing Comics


June 2005: "We're seeing the conversion of our economy from a General Motors economy to a Wal-Mart economy." - Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)


May 2005: "Life is made up of marble and mud." - Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables


April 2005: "In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning point." - Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables


March 2005: "The scientist, the scholar, the missionary, the trader, or the soldier was in, or thought about, the Orient because he could be there, or could think about it, with very little resistance on the Orient's part." --Edward Said, Orientalism


February 2005: "As an existing society is increasingly endangered by its internal tensions, the energies spent in maintaining an ideology grow greater and finally the weapons are readied for supporting it with violence." - Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory, 1968


January 2005: "I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking!" - Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life


December 2004: "It is in the American grain. Benjamin Franklin, the practical scientist, skilled statesman and sophisticated lover, allowed the French to mistake him for Rousseau's Natural Man. Hemingway poses as a non-literary sportsman, Faulkner as a farmer; Abe Lincoln allowed himself to be taken for a simple country lawyer--until the chips were down[...]. America is a land of masking jokers. We wear the mask for purposes of agression as well as for defense; when we are projecting the future and preserving the past."--Ralph Ellison, 1958


November 2004: "To err is human. To really foul things up requires a computer." - Philip Howard


October 2004: "Those who are willing to sacrifice a little freedom for security are deserving of neither freedom nor security." --Ben Franklin


September 2004: When you know all the answers, you haven't asked all the questions.


August 2004: I went to school to become a wit and only got halfway through....


July 2004: "I don't mind if people think I'm crazy. In fact, I think it's great! It gives me tremendous latitude for behavior." - Leo Buscaglia


June 2004: "I read recipes the same way I read science fiction. I get to the end and think, 'Well, that's not going to happen.'" - Rita Rudner


May 2004: I will get married "when I find a man with more balls than me." (Salma Hayek)




From my e-mail signatures:



"How long before we white people get over our bitter resentments about being demoted to the status of equality with non-whites? . . . How long until we white people will stop insisting that blacks exercise personal responsibility, build strong families, educate themselves enough to edit the Harvard Law Review, and work hard enough to become President of the United States, only to threaten to assassinate them when they do?" --Andrew M. Manis, the MACON (GA) TELEGRAPH, December 12, 2008 (April 2009-present)


"You can build a throne with bayonets, but you can't sit on it for long." -- Boris Yeltsin (August 2008-April 2009)


"Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition, there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes." - George Soros (August 2007-July 2008)


"It is dangerous fantasy to believe that if 'they' can be identified and labeled, and then treated or punished, the nation will be somehow purified, made safer for the rest of us.... When in fact we need to examine poverty, racism, the paucity of meaningful work at a living wage, the lack of access to day care, antifeminism, and a host of other problems, let us not be diverted by 'bad' mothers." Molly Ladd-Taylor and Lauri Umansky, "Bad Mothers": The Politics of Blame in Twentieth-Century America (22,23) (January-August 2007)


"The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself' as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory; therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory." --Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks (translated in Orientalism by Edward Said) (June 2006-January 2007)


"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty." - Edward R. Murrow (January-June 2006)


"Food first, then morality." - Bertolt Brecht (September 2005-January 2006)


"How many of the people I know have intricate, abstract, expressionist paintings of their mother, created out of their own emotions, attitudes, hands." - Ellen Goodman (August-September 2005)


"The laugh is a social corrective like a curtsy or the guillotine." - William Gass (June-August 2005)


Sign, sign, everywhere a sign
Blockin' out the scenery, breakin' my mind
Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign?
- From "Signs" by the 5 Man Electrical Band, 1971 (April-June 2005)


"There is something so massive, stable, and almost irresistibly imposing, in the exterior presentment of established rank and great possessions, that their very existence seems to give them a right to exist." - Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (March-April 2005)


"The economy . . . on the world scale . . . is disorganized and chaotic, richer than ever yet unable to eliminate human wretchedness." - Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory, 1968 (February 2005)


"Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced." - James Baldwin (October 2004-January 2005)


"Be sure to expose yourself to criticism: A fine polish requires an abrasive." - Marilyn vos Savant (March-April 2004)


A student essay stated: "The girl tumbled down the stairs and lay prostitute at the bottom."

In the margin of the paper, the professor commented: "My dear sir, you must learn to distinguish between a fallen woman and one who has merely slipped." (March 2004)


"My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular." - Adlai Stevenson

"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." - Thomas Paine

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." - H.L. Mencken

"Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others." - William White (October 2003-February 2004)


"Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty." - Mark Twain (July-October 2003)


"Everyday radical adjustment is a crisis in self-esteem; we undergo a test; we have to prove ourselves. It needs inordinate self confidence to face drastic change, without inner trembling" - Eric Hopper, "The Ordeal of Change" (March-June 2003; this quote reminded me of my theory about why different people can observe and/or experience the same thing in different ways: Most of the time, we merely interpret new information in such a way that it can be assimilated with what we already believe; otherwise, we would be forced to deal with an identity crisis every day.)


"The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish truth. Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate....Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." - The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (August 2002-March 2003)


"When you come to the edge of all the light you know, and are about to step off into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing one of two things will happen: There will be something solid to stand on, or you will be taught how to fly." - Barbara J. Winter (April 2001; I later saw it quoted in Hillary Rodham Clinton's Living History.)


everything is ok in the end. if it's not ok, then it's not the end. (January-February 2001, or, as I would later discover, the month that I became pregnant)


"I've never thought of myself as a great beauty - just a magician." - Sharon Stone (January-February 2001)


"You know it's going to hell when the best rapper out there is white and the best golfer is black." - Charles Barkley, SPIN Magazine, January 2001 (December 2000, while I was the Newsletter Coordinator of the University of Michigan Undergraduate English Association, so this caused a minor scandal; you can read my follow-up e-mail here)


When I was a child, we had a quicksandbox in the back yard.

Eventually I was an only child. (November 2000)


"For men, love is a thing apart; for women it is their whole existence." - Lord Byron (June 2000)


I'm not dead yet.... (April 2000)


Work like you don't need the money. Dance like nobody's looking. Love like you've never been hurt. Dream like you'll live forever. Live like you'll die today. (January 2000)


In just two days, tomorrow will be yesterday. (November-December 1999)


"People are like stained-glass windows: They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but, when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within." - Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross (September 1999)



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