Snippets Worth Remembering

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It's inhabitants are as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'saints and angels and martyrs and holy men.' and he would have meant the same thing.

John Steinbeck's "Cannery Row"

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As Ellen Bravo, director of Family Values @ Work consortium, observed, most 'women are not thinking about 'having it all,' they're worried about losing it all -- their jobs, their children's health, their families' financial stability -- because of the regular conflicts that arise between being a good employee and a responsible parent.'

Sheryl Sandberg's "Lean in"

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'Our job is not to make young women grateful. It is to make the ungrateful so they keep going.'

Gloria Steinem, quoted in Sheryl Sandberg's "Lean In"

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"In a letter to The Atlantic in June 2012, Barnard president Debora Spar wrote about this messy and complicated emotion, exploring why she and so many successful women feel so guilty. She decided that it's because women 'have been subtly striving all our lives to prove that we have picked up the torch that feminism provided. That we haven't failed the mothers and grandmothers who made our ambitions possible. And yet, in a deep and profound way, we are failing. Because feminism wasn't supposed to make us feel guilty, or prod us into constant competitions over who is raising children better, organizing more cooperative marriages, or getting less sleep. It was supposed to make us free -- to give us not only choices but the ability to make these choices without constantly feeling that we'd somehow gotten it wrong."

In Sheryl Sandberg's "Lean In"

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As we do more fly by wire business, meaning we trust algorithms more and more to make some decisions for us, they become these opaque black boxes, and if you don't understand what's going on inside that black box, you're bound to misinterpret the results. And so it's no longer safe to just sort of throw your trust over the wall to some algorithm or to your staff that's running these algorithms. You may need to sort of understand / internalize the trade offs of using one model versus another yourself.

Bill Howe of University of Washington in Coursera "Data Science" course

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It is by not always thinking of yourself, if you can manage it, that you might somehow be happy. Until you make room in your life for someone as important to you as yourself, you will always be searching and lost ...

Richard Bach, Spoken by Leslie Parrish in The Bridge Across Forever

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We're different, we're the same. You thought you'd never find a word to say to a woman who didn't fly airplanes. I couldn't imagine myself spending time with a man who didn't love music. Could it be it's not as important to be alike as it is to be curious? Because we're different, we can have the fun of exchanging worlds, giving our loves and excitements to each other. You can learn music, I can learn flying. And that's only the beginning. I think it would go on for us as long as we live.

Richard Bach, spoken by Leslie Parrish in The Bridge Across Forever

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Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look at the stars.

Henry VanDyke

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. . . that was the first thing I had to learn about her, and maybe the hardest I've ever learned about anything--that she is her own, and what she gives me is of her choosing, and the more precious because of it. Sometime a butterfly will come to sit in your open palm, but if you close your hand, one way or the other, it--and its choice to be there--are gone.

Barbara Hambly, Dragonsbane

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A soulmate is someone who has locks that fit our keys, and keys to fit our locks. When we feel safe enough to open the locks, our truest selves step out and we can be completely and honestly who we are; we can be loved for who we are and not for who we're pretending to be. Each unveils the best part of the other. No matter what else goes wrong around us, with that one person we're safe in our own paradise. Our soulmate is someone who shares our deepest longings, our sense of direction. When we're two balloons, and together our direction is up, chances are we've found the right person. Our soulmate is the one who makes life come to life.

Richard Bach, from The Bridge Across Forever

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The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.

Robert Maynard Hutchins

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When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had and never will have.

Edgar Watson Howe

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Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it especially well.

Sylvia Plath

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Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful friend will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping and then with the breath of kindness throw the rest away.

Dinah Mulock Craik

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Sometimes you find that your boyfriend is more of a habit than a love. Kind of like the stuffed animal you've had since birth--it means too much to give up, but you've definitely out grown it.

Lori

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Can miles truly separate us from friends? If we want to be with someone we love, aren't we already there?

Richard Bach

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Too many of us stay walled because we are afraid of being hurt. We are afraid to care too much for fear that the other person does not care at all.

Eleanor Roosevelt