Michael Hogan > Michael's Quotes

“When you totally commit yourself to a project and do your work quietly and well, unknown friends will find you and angels will surround you.”
― Michael Hogan

“Not only does free trade have nothing to do with democracy, but in most cases throughout history the two have been inimical. Free trade prospered only at the expense of democracy and the freedom of the majority.”
― Michael Hogan, Savage Capitalism and the Myth of Democracy: Latin America in the Third Millennium

“You should date a girl who reads.
Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes.”
― Rosemarie Urquico

“Even when she walks one would believe that she dances.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Art is not escape, but a way of finding order in chaos, a way of confronting life.”
― Robert Hayden

“The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living.”
― Viktor Emil Frankl

“A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how".”
― Victor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.”
― Carl Gustav Jung

“I have no use for people who exhibit manners.”
― Amy Vanderbilt

“Nothing you did made sense
and nothing you’ll ever do.”
― Michael Hogan, Winter Solstice

“We make our own rules and lose by them.”
― Michael Hogan, Winter Solstice

“Men do not die on mornings like this:
whatever happens then happens in their name,
like the lives of obscure saints, who exist only in folk memory.”
― Michael Hogan, Winter Solstice

“All the wrong questions have been asked and the correct answers are not true.”
― Michael Hogan, Letters For My Son

“A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.”
― William Stafford

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
― Abraham Lincoln, Great Speeches / Abraham Lincoln: with Historical Notes by John Grafton

“Assume a virtue, if you have it not.
That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat,
Of habits devil, is angel yet in this,
That to the use of actions fair and good
He likewise gives a frock or livery
That aptly is put on. Refrain tonight,
And that shall lend a kind of easiness
To the next abstinence; the next more easy;
For use almost can change the stamp of nature.”
― William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“When words fail, the hammer drops,
living can never be its own excuse.”
― Michael Hogan, Winter Solstice

“We give more economic aid to multinational corporations to increase their profits than we do to all the countries in the world combined.”
― Michael Hogan, Savage Capitalism and the Myth of Democracy: Latin America in the Third Millennium

“Sometimes you go so far in your life,
you can’t get back
though you know it’s not really your life.”
― Michael Hogan, Winter Solstice

“Sometimes we know people who are
too wonderful for words. I am not one of them.
Or you, for that matter, as you well know.”
― Michael Hogan, Winter Solstice

“We fit the pieces of our life together in a pattern,
but there is no image on the puzzlebox to guide us.”
― Michael Hogan, Winter Solstice

“Most stories are not about people
but about life, an addiction like the rest of them
that destroys you even as you love it,
but you love it anyway and can never get enough.”
― Michael Hogan, Winter Solstice

“Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that there are always men who like to feel a natural superiority which is not dependent on accomplish­ment and does not need to be proved.”
― Michael Hogan, The Irish Soldiers of Mexico

“Anyone who pretends to "understand" Latin America is a fool.”
― Michael Hogan, Savage Capitalism and the Myth of Democracy: Latin America in the Third Millennium

“a good friendship euchres the universe.”
― Michael Hogan

“That digression business got on my nerves. I don't now. The trouble with me is, I like it when somebody digresses. It's more interesting and all. ...lots of time you don't know what interests you most till you start talking about something that doesn't interest you most. ...I like it when somebody gets excited about something.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“The measure of a country’s prosperity should not be how many poor people drive cars, but how many affluent people use public transportation.”
― Michael Hogan

“In the time of your life, live—so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches. Seek goodness everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its hiding place and let it be free and unashamed.

Place in matter and in flesh the least of the values, for these are the things that hold death and must pass away. Discover in all things that which shines and is beyond corruption. Encourage virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and sorrow by the shame and terror of the world. Ignore the obvious, for it is unworthy of the clear eye and the kindly heart.

Be the inferior of no man, or of any men be superior. Remember that every man is a variation of yourself. No man's guilt is not yours, nor is any man's innocence a thing apart. Despise evil and ungodliness, but not men of ungodliness or evil. These, understand. Have no shame in being kindly and gentle but if the time comes in the time of your life to kill, kill and have no regret.

In the time of your life, live—so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world, but shall smile to the infinite delight and mystery of it.”
― William Saroyan, The time of your life

“The problem with the politicians of both parties in the US is that neither of them have a real agenda except to feather their own nests. They both have their hands deep in corporate pockets. All the rest is sleight of hand and distraction to keep the public occupied with trivia, divided against each other, and thinking their vote matters.”
― Michael Hogan