July 14, 2014

Good Morning! Here are your daily birthday quotations...

Irving Stone (1903 – 1989):

“There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books.”

and

“Talent is cheap; dedication is expensive. It will cost you your life.”

and

“Each of us has his own alphabet with which to create poetry.”

Northrop Frye (1912 – 1991):

“Nobody is capable of of free speech unless he knows how to use language, and such knowledge is not a gift: it has to learned and worked at.”

and

“The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.”

Woody Guthrie (1912 – 1967):

“Any fool can make something complicated. It takes a genius to make it simple.”

and

“This machine kills fascists.” (Written on his guitar)

and

“I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard travelling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think that you've not got any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I'd starve to death before I'd sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.”

Pema Chödrön (1936 - ):

“The only reason we don't open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don't feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else's eyes.”

and

“You are the sky. Everything else – it’s just the weather.”

and

“The most difficult times for many of us are the ones we give ourselves.”

Christopher Priest (1943 - ):

“The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you wont find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled.”