the best lately.

The other day I was walking my happy Sunday self to church and this happyself was pleasantly surprised to see two usual Remedy suspects in Market Square. As I was talking to them usual suspect number 1 (Josh Birkebak) said about usual suspect number 2 (Drew Norris): “Drew loves words.” I swear, it was like showing up to a party where someone was wearing your dress. Take. it. off. I had it on first. I said, “I DO! Me too! I LOVE WORDS.”Happyself hadn’t thought to make that declaration at that point at the conversation and suddenly I became weirdlydefensiveself. Usual suspect number 2 remains calm. To metaphorically strut my stuff in my dress, I say it again: “I really love love words. okay?“. Usual suspect 2. "Okay."Most of my 24 years of life I've been wearing that dress like skin. All myselves, happyself, lonelyself, sadself, youngself, nowself, futureself love the collection of words on the page.

“And I begin to string words together words together like beads to tell a story” Anne Lamott.

This love of words in general and how they are strung together for sentences, paragraphs, poems, novels, memoirs, etc.etc.etc., I have developed a habit slash obsession with looking up quotes. Hours, people. HOURS. This is a throw back as early as middle school, back in AOL days when I would write down quotes about love (“love”) and dot all my i’s with hearts. Because I heart words. From then until now until forever and ever amen. It’s “self-care”, it’s interesting, and clarifying and snapshot of bigger moment. Here’s what I do: I put two names in quotes with the word quote right after it. “Ernest Hemingway” “Mary Oliver” quotes. And then I sit in Blackbird on Saturday morning and instead of writing my CTE I read excerpts from “A Farewell to Arms”. Which I will copy and paste on to my quote page where Hemingway will end up right beside lines from Pulp Fiction that I looked up last week and which are right above Mary Oliver and Willa Cather. These people would make strange bed fellows all together because I’m pretty sure Jules and Vincent would probably try and act like gentlemen but would more than likely scare the hell out of Mary Oliver. Understandably so. She’d probably write an amazing poem about it that I would love to read. So this is what I do. Some of you might not think this is a rocking great time. I don’t know what to tell you other that I'm sad for you. And this is a selection of the best. Lately.

"If you really want a challenge, just deal with yourself."— Tori Amos

"Inelegantly, and without my consent, time passed."— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You)

"If Jesus was right, these are all my brothers and sisters. And they are so letting themselves go." Anne Lamott

"i carry your heart with me
(i carry it in my heart)
i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing,
my darling)
i fear no fate (for you are my fate,
my sweet)
i want no world (for beautiful you are my world,
my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)"— E.E. Cummings

#70"For some it is harder towrite a novel than to row a bathtub across the North Atlantic."— James N. Frey (How to Write a Damn Good Novel: A Step-by-Step No Nonsense Guide to Dramatic Storytelling)

who pays any attentionto the syntax of thingswill never wholly kiss you"— E.E. Cummings

"I would like to perfect the art of being studiously aloof"— Ani DiFranco (Ani DiFranco - Little Plastic Castle)

"While the sad, galloping wind murders butterfliesI love you, and my happiness bites into the plum of your mouth . . .I want to do with youwhat spring does to the cherry trees." -Neruda

"She would have been a good woman," The Misfit said,"if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."-- Flannery O'Connor, "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

"everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing,though sometimes it is necessaryto reteach a thing its loveliness" -- G. Kinnell

Relax. Only 1/6.5 billionth of this is about you. Bumper Sticker.

You’ve got to love this in a God—consistently assembling the motleyest people to bring, into the lonely and frightening world, a commitment to caring and community.
— Anne Lamott
"No, I don't like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don't like work -- no man does -- but I like what's in the work -- the chance to find yourself. Your own reality -- for yourself, not others -- what no other man can know. They can only see the mere show, and can never tell what it means." Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

"Speak to us about the deepest yearning of our hearts, about our many wishes, about hope; not about the many strategies for (mere) survival, but about trust; not about new methods of satisfying our emotional needs, but about love. Speak to us about a vision larger than our changing perspectives and about a voice deeper than the clamorings of our mass media. Yes, speak to us about something or someone greater than ourselves. Speak to us about God."--Henri J.M. Nouwen

"Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living"— Jonathan Safran Foer (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close)

Christians whose loyalty to the Prince of Peace puts them out of step with today’s nationalistic world, because they are willing to love their nation’s friends but not to hate their nation’s enemies, are not unrealistic dreamers who think that by their objections they will end all wars. On the contrary, it is the soldiers who think they can put an end to wars by preparing for just one more.
— John Howard Yoder

Mia: I do believe Marsellus Wallace, my husband, your boss, told you to take ME out and do WHATEVER I WANTED. Now I wanna dance, I wanna win. I want that trophy, so dance good. Pulp Fiction.

Jules: Whether or not what we experienced was an According to Hoyle miracle is insignificant. What is significant is that I felt the touch of God. God got involved. Pulp Fiction.

"Nothing that God ever made is the same thing to more than one person. "— Zora Neale Hurston

"Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly -- all these make for great stories."— Chuck Palahniuk

"We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better."— Chuck Palahniuk (Asfixia)

Each must enter the nest made by the other imperfect birds" Rumi

There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won't have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus. Annie Dillard

Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don't drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor's yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper."— Anne Lamott

The Christian writer does not decide what would be good for the world and proceed to deliver it. Like a very doubtful Jacob, he confronts what stands in his path and wonders if he will come out of the struggle at all.– Flannery O’Connor

Nationalism is an infantile disease; it is the measles of mankind. Einstein

If there is any meaning in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, it is this: that there is a God who created us, and who loves us so much that He would stop at nothing to bring us to Him. And I really suspect that of all the things we think we want to know, the only thing we really want to know is that we are loved. And if Jesus means anything, He means that you are loved. I hope you know that. And I hope you stop worrying about all the stuff you don't know, because I don't think it amounts to a hill of beans. Rich Mullins. Arrows pointing toward heaven

I think that all these doctrinal statements that all the congregations come up with over the years are basically just not very worthwhile. I don't mean to sound mean toward the people who came up with them. I understand in the past there have been many heretical movements, and we still need to maintain sound doctrine... But I think our real doctrine is that doctrine that is born out in our character. I think you can profess the Apostles' Creed until Jesus returns, but if you don't love somebody, you never were a Christian.
Rich Mullins

"There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for."— Albert Camus

"If the gospel isn't good news for everybody, then it isn't good news for anybody. And this is because the most powerful things happen when the church surrenders its desire to convert people and convince them to join. It is when the church gives itself away in radical acts of service and compassion, expecting nothing in return, that the way of Jesus is most vividly put on display. To do this, the church must stop thinking about everybody primarily in categories of in or out, saved or not, believer or nonbeliever. Besides the fact that these terms are offensive to those who are the "un" and "non", they work against Jesus' teachings about how we are to treat each other. Jesus commanded us to love our neighbor, and our neighbor can be anybody. We are all created in the image of God, and we are all sacred, valuable creations of God. Everybody matters. To treat people differently based on who believes what is to fail to respect the image of God in everyone. As the book of James says, "God shows no favoritism." So we don't either."— Rob Bell

"You do not know how long you are in a river when the current moves swiftly. It seems a long time and it may be very short. The water was cold and in flood and many things passed that had been floated off the banks when the river rose. I was lucky to have a heavy timber to hold on to, and I lay in the icy water with my chin on the wood, holding on as easily as I could with both hands."- Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, Chapter 31

Left to its own devices, her mind is a fat hummingbird flitting through leafy trees of anxiety, apology, sorrow, excuses, and dreams of grandeur, dreams of humiliation. Sometimes she watches it run off, and it makes her laugh and shake her head. It's like a video game. Bright fast blips of worry and anger come at her, and, after fending them off, she's attacked by the huge lumbering Czechoslovakian blobs of tiredness and broken-spiritedness which break into small, faster missiles of regret when she fires at them. What a half-baked species we are, she thinks, and does what she can to make her insides more habitable. Anne Lamott, Joe Jones

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.(Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), U.S. author. First published in Paris Review (Flushing, NY, spring 1958). Interview in Writers at Work, Second Series, ed. George Plimpton (1963).)

"...there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone."— Nicole Krauss (The History of Love)

Ever since there have been men, man has given himself over to too little joy. That alone, my brothers, is our origianl sin. I should believe only in a God who understood how to dance. Henri Matisse.

"Every artist has a basic premise pervading his whole life, and that premise can provide the impulse to everything he creates. For me the dominating premise has been the need for understanding and tenderness and fortitude among individuals trapped by circumstance." Tennessee Williams

"And now the old story has begun to write itself over there," said Carl softly. "Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes for thousands of years."— Willa Cather (O Pioneers!)

"I am a man. Nothing human is alien to me." Montagne

"it is now hard to leave the country but it is in no way impossible."- Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, Chapter 33