There's an African proverb: "When death finds you, may it find you alive." Alive means living your own damn life, not the life that your parents wanted, or the life some cultural group or political party wanted, but the life that your own soul wants to live.
—Michael Meade
Our thoughts limit what we're capable of doing. There are external forces arrayed against us, but there are also internal forces that sabotage us before we even get started. Our mind is good at setting us up for failure and getting us to think small. But I have found that we will do for love that which we don't think is possible. So the question to ask ourselves is "What do I love?
—Julia Butterfly Hill
The worst indictment I ever heard from my father was when he'd say of another man, "He's so lazy he stinks.
—Joseph Bathanti
Sisyphus was a highly productive worker.
—Sparrow
Possibly the heart of our humanity is to want something we cannot achieve by our own efforts.
—Tim Farrington
No one who has stood for high values—love, truth, justice—has died being able to declare victory, once and for all. If we embrace values like those, we need to find ways to stand in the gap for the long haul, and be prepared to die without having achieved our goals.
—Parker J. Palmer
It was thanks to women like Eppie that this moment in history could exist—a moment when a woman could be a serious contender for the presidency of the United States. In the 1970s Eppie had defied her husband by helping to found a Planned Parenthood branch in her town. She'd started a women's empowerment group before most of us even knew what empowerment meant.
—Mally Z. Ray
Romania had been under communist rule since 1945, but it was after Ceausescu came to power in 1965 that life really began to deteriorate.… Then, one night in the late 1980s, a group of men dressed as street sweepers draped the statue of Lenin in Bucharest with big truck tires and set them on fire. It was a bold and daring act in a country where, it was said, for every Romanian on the street there were two secret police officers. The next morning traffic was detoured while workers from nearby factories were brought in to clean the statue with razor blades. That day I realized that change was possible.
—Florin Ion Firimita
This increasingly intelligent, fast-moving civilization needs to be applying some of its intelligence to things that change slowly.… If we are constantly tending to the immediate, day-to-day problems, we'll lose that sense of the long term, and then we could be really sorry.
—Stewart Brand
To everyone's surprise, wildlife abounds in the deserted environs of the doomed [Chernobyl] nuclear plant. Elk, wild pigs, wolves, and rabbits all seem to be flourishing. These animals have somehow learned to cope with the high levels of radiation. Who knows, perhaps there are mutations: A pig that can climb. A rabbit with a prehensile tail. An elk with a unicorn's horn. Cells are quick-change artists. Life loves life. Humans may end, but the world won't.
—Sybil Smith
They told me that her blood was too thick for her heart to pump, and I wondered how it was that someone stayed alive so long after nothing's left. I had seen bugs crushed and gone so quickly. I couldn't decide if life was fragile or tenacious beyond belief.
—Patricia Bralley
As lines add history to a face, cracks only improve the value of a heart—take it from me, I've got a heart cracked like crystal, and when you hold it up to the light it's not without class.
—John Rosenthal
I used to say, watching two elderly women crossing the street in flowered hats, holding each other's arms, "Look at those cute old ladies." I didn't mind the stereotypes that pepper movies and television shows. Now old people are no longer cute or mean or silly or wise to me. They are people, in all their broken fullness. Despite the glitches in faculties and functioning, anyone who's lived that long has learned something the rest of us don't know.
—Tarn Wilson
I was seventy-six in April, and the reason for my relative longevity is that I never take any legal drugs—except a few months ago. I was at a party, and I took an aspirin. I didn't even have a headache. I just gave in to peer pressure.
—Paul Krassner
How can one accept—let alone enjoy—aging in a culture where God is twenty-five; where advertisements are filled with twenty-somethings in halter tops and tight t-shirts, unless the ad is for a drug to treat incontinence, high blood pressure, or elevated cholesterol? What about the wisdom of age? What about endurance? What about the beauty of a face etched by years that were not always easy?
—Genie Zeiger