Dave Schaafsma > Dave's Quotes

“Conversations are efforts toward good relations. They are an elementary form of reciprocity. They are the exercise of our love for each other. They are the enemies of our loneliness, our doubt, our anxiety, our tendencies to abdicate. To continue to be in good conversation over our enormous and terrifying problems is to be calling out to each other in the night. If we attend with imagination and devotion to our conversations, we will find what we need; and someone among us will act—it does not matter whom—and we will survive.”
― Barry Lopez

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
― George Orwell

“Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”
― Barry Lopez

“Remember on this one thing, said Badger. The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each other's memories. This is how people care for themselves. ”
― Barry Lopez, Crow and Weasel

“Pessimism of the spirit; optimism of the will.”
― Antonio Gramsci

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“In a pine tree,
A few yards away from my window sill,
A brilliant blue jay is springing up and down, up and down,
On a branch.
I laugh, as I see him abandon himself
To entire delight, for he knows as well as I do
That the branch will not break.”
― James Wright, The Branch Will Not Break

“He not busy being born is busy dying.”
― Bob Dylan

“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one less traveled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

“You have to remember. . .that for this little boy whom you have met, his life is just as important to him, as your life is to you. No matter how insufficient or how shabby it may seem to some, it is the only one he has.”
― Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

“May your heart always be joyful. May your song always be sung.”
― Bob Dylan

“It is thanks to my evening reading alone that I am still more or less sane.”
― W.G. Sebald, Vertigo

“Jim Jarmusch once told me Fast, Cheap, and Good… pick two. If it’s fast and cheap it won’t be good. If it’s cheap and good, it won’t be fast. If it’s fast and good, it won’t be cheap. Fast, cheap and good … pick two words to live by.

Tom Waits”
― Paul Maher Jr., Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters

“Instead of cursing the darkness, light a candle.”
― Ben Franklin

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Eleonora

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
― haruki murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“In a time of destruction, create something.”
― Maxine Hong Kingston

“I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.”
― Tom Waits

“Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom. ”
― James Wright, Above the River: The Complete Poems

“Across the road, tadpoles are dancing on the quarter thumbnail of the moon. They cant see, not yet.”
― James Wright

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”
― Henri Bergson

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
― Mary Oliver

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
― Mary Oliver

“TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
― Howard Zinn

“A dream does not die on its own. A dream is vanquished by the choices ordinary people make about real things in their own lives...”
― Jonathan Kozol, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation

“I have been criticized throughout the course of my career for placing too much faith in the reliability of children's narratives; but I have almost always found that children are a great deal more reliable in telling us what actually goes on in public school than many of the adult experts who develop policies that shape their destinies.”
― Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation