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What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.

“We are all fallen creatures and all very hard to live with..”--C.S. Lewis.


"I don't read the blogs much. I don't like the tone-the rather in-your-face road-rage quality of a lot of exchange on the Internet. I don't like the threads that come out of any given piece of journalism. It seems that when people know they can't be held accountable, when they don't have eye contact, it seems to bring out a rather nasty, truculent, aggressive edge...."
~Ian McEwan


"Don’t threaten me with love, baby; let’s just go walking in the rain"
~Billie Holiday


"The only brotherhood they belonged to was the one which asked the enduring question: how do I get through the next twenty minutes?"
~William Kennedy


How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
~Barry Lopez

The greatest evil is not done in those sordid dens of evil that Dickens loved to paint ... but is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clear, carpeted, warmed, well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.
~C. S. Lewis

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
~Alexander Solzhenitsyn



"Diogenes was knee deep in a stream washing vegetables. Coming up to him, Plato said, 'My good Diogenes, if you knew how to pay court to kings, you wouldn't have to wash vegetables.'
'And,' replied Diogenes, 'if you knew how to wash vegetables, you wouldn't have to pay court to kings.'"

* * *

"I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence."
~John Keats

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."
~Daniel Patrick Moynihan

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."
~Oscar Wilde

"As a great part of the uneasiness of matrimony arises from mere trifles, it would be wise in every young married man to enter into an agreement with his wife that in all disputes the party who was most convinced they were right should always surrender the victory. By this means both would be more forward to give up the cause."
~Henry Fielding

How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a weary world.
~ William Shakespeare


"And having food and raiment let us be therewith content." ~ St Paul