#resent

And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#present

The 'what should be' never did exist, but people keep trying to live up to it. There is no 'what should be,' there is only what is. ↗

— Lenny Bruce

#past #present #nostalgia

Learn to say no to demands, requests, invitations, and activities that leave you with no time for yourself. Until I learned to say no, and mean it, I was always overloaded by stress. You may feel guilty and selfish at first for guarding your down- time, but you’ll soon find that you are a much nicer, more present, more productive person in each instance you do choose to say yes. ↗

— Holly Mosier

#mindfulness #opt-out #peace-of-mind #present-moment #purpose

Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality. ↗

— Alan Wilson Watts

#future #past #present #reality #way-of-zen

The more I write stories for young people, and the more young readers I meet, the more I'm struck by how much kids long to see themselves in stories. To see their identities and perspectives—their avatars—on the page. Not as issues to be addressed or as icons for social commentary, but simply as people who get to do cool things in amazing worlds. Yes, all the “issue” books are great and have a place in literature, but it's a different and wildly joyous gift to find yourself on the pages of an entertainment, experiencing the thrills and chills of a world more adventurous than our own. And when you see that as a writer, you quickly realize that you don't want to be the jerk who says to a young reader, “Sorry, kid. You don't get to exist in story; you're too different.” You don't want to be part of our present dystopia that tells kids that if they just stopped being who they are they could have a story written about them, too. That's the role of the bad guy in the dystopian stories, right? Given a choice, I'd rather be the storyteller who says every kid can have a chance to star. - posted at Kirkus Review in post "Straight-Laced Dystopias ↗

— Paolo Bacigalupi

#lgbtq #minorities #representation #teens #writing

There was never sufficient evidence presented at my trial to support a finding of intent to kill. ↗

— Jack Henry Abbott

#finding #intent #kill #never #presented

It is an essential tenet of our whole representative form of government, the idea that there should not be some tyranny which makes it so nobody can even have a chance to vote. ↗

— Todd Akin

#essential #even #form #government #idea

Never hold resentments for the person who tells you what you need to hear; count them among your truest, most caring, and valuable friends. ↗

— Mike Norton

#brotherhood #envy #friend #friendship #need

In a sad twist of fate, the bill to reauthorize the Patriot Act was debated on the floor of the House of Representatives the same day that terrorists struck again. ↗

— Jim Sensenbrenner

#again #bill #day #debated #fate

As a former Catholic, and as someone who even today is not opposed to being called a Christian, I felt I had every right to use the symbols of the Church and resented being told not to. ↗

— Andres Serrano

#called #catholic #christian #church #even