Michael Simon > Michael's Quotes

“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
― James Baldwin

“We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.”
― Carl Bernstein

“Whatever emotional state you’re in while you’re parenting conveys more to your child than the content of what you're doing with them, no matter how perfect your intervention looks "on paper." In other words, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, "your emotional state is the message.”
― Michael Y. Simon, The Approximate Parent: Discovering the Strategies that Work for Your Teenager

“The truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas – complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemmas, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse.”
― George F. Kennan

“All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life—where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.”
― Miranda July, It Chooses You

“You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby.
But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
― Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit

“We don't know who discovered water, but we are certain it wasn't a fish.”
― John Culkin

“Whereas what we need is to fumble around in the darkness, because that's where our lives (not necessarily all of the time, but at least some of the time, and particularly when life gets problematical for us) takes place.”
― John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings

“Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.”
― Donald Woods Winnicott