#chi

In everything we do, in order to succeed, we must believe in ourselves; that we are highly motivated achievers. ↗

— Ellen J. Barrier

#motivated #succeed #motivational

Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder. ↗

— Malcolm Gladwell

#music

I'm so cool that the kids come to my bedroom and go, 'Mom! Turn the music down! ↗

— Melissa Etheridge

#children #coolness #music #noise #parenting

Partying means drinking. It also means playing records by Lou Reed and Chicago, which I thought was a city but is also a band it turns out. ↗

— Ron Currie Jr.

#drink #everything-matters #fun #lou-reed #music

What has been happening the last four years in City Hall is that they have been closing recreation centers, closing libraries. We have not looked after our children in City Hall. ↗

— Carl Stokes

#been #centers #children #city #city hall

It felt like I had a thousand packs of Strawberry Pop Rocks simultaneously detonating in my chest, and I dilated at least eight centimeters! ↗

— Piper Faust

#humor-relationships #southern-fiction #relationship

In this image (watching sensual murder through a peephole) Lorrain embodies the criminal delight of decadent art. The watcher who records the crimes (both the artist and consumer of art) is constructed as marginal, powerless to act, and so exculpated from action, passive subject of a complex pleasure, condemning and yet enjoying suffering imposed on others, and condemning himself for his own enjoyment. In this masochistic celebration of disempowerment, the sharpest pleasure recorded is that of the death of some important part of humanity. The dignity of human life is the ultimate victim of Lorrain's art, thrown away on a welter of delighted self-disgust. ↗

— Jennifer Birkett

#consumer #decadence #decadent #diginty #disempowerment

When you read to a child, when you put a book in a child's hands, you are bringing that child news of the infinitely varied nature of life. You are an awakener. ↗

— Paula Fox

#children #reading #nature

According to the surgeon general, obesity today is officially an epidemic; it is arguably the most pressing public health problem we face, costing the health care system an estimated $90 billion a year. Three of every five Americans are overweight; one of every five is obese. The disease formerly known as adult-onset diabetes has had to be renamed Type II diabetes since it now occurs so frequently in children. A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association predicts that a child born in 2000 has a one-in-three chance of developing diabetes. (An African American child's chances are two in five.) Because of diabetes and all the other health problems that accompany obesity, today's children may turn out to be the first generation of Americans whose life expectancy will actually be shorter than that of their parents. The problem is not limited to America: The United Nations reported that in 2000 the number of people suffering from overnutrition--a billion--had officially surpassed the number suffering from malnutrition--800 million. ↗

— Michael Pollan

#diabetes #fatties #food #health #health-care

I sadly want a reform in the construction of children. Nature's only idea seems to be to make them machines for the production of incessant noise. ↗

— Wilkie Collins

#noise #nature