"One of the functions of art is to give people the words to know their own experience. There are always areas of vast silence in any culture, and part of an artist’s job is to go into those areas and come back from the silence with something to say. It’s one reason why we read poetry, because poets can give us the words we need. When we read good poetry, we often say, ‘Yeah, that’s it. That’s how I feel.’
--Ursula K. Le Guin
“The duty of a leader is to create an organization where it is easy to practice kindness.”
– Kim Cameron
"Moments, ideas, a single poem in a collection — a work of genius, no matter how individually wrought — is never the product of a single individual. We should stop thinking of genius as an attribute and instead start to think of it as a condition, a circumstance."
--Yuval Sharon, essay at Los Angeles Review of Books website
“That experience of touching down in a totally foreign place is like having a blank canvas: You begin with nothing, but stroke by stroke you build a life. This process requires everything great art requires — risk-tasking, hope, a great deal of imagination, all the qualities that are the building blocks of art.”
-- Edwidge Danticat
"The Internet and the connection economy turn the economics of mass on its head. It's now cheaper and more efficient to make edgy, amazing products for the weird edge cases (who are listening and talking and who care) than it is to push yet another average product onto the already overloaded average people in the middle of the curve."
--Seth Godin,
The Icarus Deception
"Childhood dreams are not kicked awake by nightmares of abuse."
--Maya Angelou, "A Brave and Startling Truth"
"It is well to fly towards the light, even where there may be some fluttering and bruising of wings against the windowpanes, is it not?"
--Elizabeth Barrett Browning on the Challenge of Happiness, in a letter to Robert Browning
"In an age when the meaning of words are squeezed into the speaker's mold, marble values such as integrity can be pulverized overnight."
--John Maxwell,
Developing the Leader Within You
“Champions don’t do extraordinary things, they do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the other team to react. They follow the habits they’ve learned.”
--Tony Dungy, as found in
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
"Nobody hiding in the school bathroom/Or home alone/Pulling open the drawer/Where the pills are kept."
--Marie Howe, "Singularity"
