Becky

“All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal. ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not.”
― Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree

“If you are interested in something, you will focus on it, and if you focus attention on anything, it is likely that you will become interested in it. Many of the things we find interesting are not so by nature, but because we took the trouble of paying attention to them.”
― Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life

“I have heard that we are stupid for voting against our self interest,
and I know how hard it is to vote in my state.
I have heard that we are willfully uneducated,
and I have seen our artificially low property taxes
create our underfunded school system.
I have heard criticism from the experts,
but I have seen nothing but classism disguised
as neoliberal conjecture.
You cannot understand where I come from
if you are not also from there. I mean
that words fail
and nuance exists
and the enemy is never who we are taught to hate.”
― Belle Townsend, Push and Pull

“She said that it was a mistake to have made as few superficial friends as I have done in my life, and to have concentrated only on the few things I have concentrated on--her, for one. My children, for another. Sportswriting and being an ordinary citizen. This did not leave me well enough armored for the unexpected, was her opinion. She said this was because I didn't know my parents very well, had gone to a military school, and grown up in the south, which was full of betrayers and secret-keepers and untrustworthy people, which I agree is true, though I never knew any of them.”
― Richard Ford, The Sportswriter