Eric Westerlund

“The ultimate rebellion wasn’t fighting the system, it was circumventing the system and living your life fully.”
― Paul Stanley, Face the Music: A Life Exposed

“So much of our popular mythology focuses on the negative aspects of power that we forget that gaining power is, perhaps, the only way to enable ourselves to make a difference in our lives and in the lives of others.”
― Gene Simmons, On Power: My Journey Through the Corridors of Power and How You Can Get More Power – A Bold Guide to Ambition and Influence from the KISS Front-Man

“Never tell your reader what your story is about. Reading is a participatory sport. People do it because they are intelligent and enjoy figuring things out for themselves.
(advicetowriters)”
― George V. Higgins

“People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the power in the image of the rivers, the Styx, the Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his pole. I understood for the first time the meaning in the practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their grief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them.”
― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking