Did you know you could fly

"But let us remember that at the center of every religion is compassion, love, and forgiveness and at the periphery of every religious tradition is violence, cruelty, and war. Our vocation is to keep the periphery as far from the center as possible, to keep the hijackers of extremism at bay."

--Ira Zepp, Pedagogy of the Heart

"Technology should be a familiar subject to us, after all; it lies at the heart of printing and book history. The most recent revolution, dazzling as it may appear in its purported transformation of how we pursue knowledge and communicate with each other, is only the third of three. The first technological revolution, the invention of writing, continues to dwarf in importance both the development of moveable type in the mid-fifteenth century and the reconstruction of the world in bits and bytes near the close of the twentieth. A digitized image of a medieval manuscript or early modern book may both widen and sharpen the educational process, but it cannot wholly substitute for the experience of learning from those whose job it is to pass on their hard-earned knowledge of how and why these cultural artifacts were made. Similarly, the growth of "content" on the web, extraordinary as it is, makes the interpretation of so much information all the more crucial. In the long run, there is still much to be said for the primal encounter between critical judgment, on the one hand, and the full spectrum of cultural production in all of its formats, on the other."

-- Richard Wendorf, The Scholar-Librarian: Books, Libraries, and the Visual Arts

A soldier stationed in Mississippi, about Katrina: "This hurricane was like God and the Devil fighting it out here with Godzilla as the referee."

"This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us."

"Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love."

--Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

"Data are not information. Information is data endowed with relevance and purpose. Knowledge is information endowed with application. Wisdom is knowledge endowed with age and experience."

-- Ken Davenport, Northeast Iowa Regional Library System, in a letter printed in the May 1, 2002, Library Journal (v. 127, no. 8, p. 10)

I came across this in an interview I'm reading for my thesis. The interviewer is referring to Angela Carter's oftentimes contrived and highly stylistic manner of writing:

Interviewer: I think it's true that you do embrace opportunities for overwriting.
Carter: Embrace them? I would say that I half-suffocate them with the enthusiasm with which I wrap my arms and legs around them.

I can just hear the delicate snort and droll tone in which that line was delivered. See why I love this author so much? :)