billfrist’s most recent Quotables

Removing the fear of failing through anonymity unleashes creativity.

You think summer fires will take all the wheat.
Listen to me: What you are looking for cannot be
found now. It's winter, look at the snow--

But feel the snow.
It's dry as dust.

This is how it is with the anxious. What will not happen is happening all of the time.

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too? I thought I was the only one."

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

We still harbor the illusion that many of our conversations are private or ephemeral, but the company that now owns my very first ISP could have fifteen years of my e-mail on its servers; my instant messages are all logged; my voice-mail messages are now audio files that can be forwarded and archived [...] It may be harder today to guarantee that you are having a private conversation than it was in the Soviet Union.

It takes power away from the powerful and hands it to citizens, controversial but essential example of what the web does best: offering unrestricted dispersal of information so that people can judge for themselves.

I unfortunately have never in my life been to a wild party. Maybe they're interesting. I've never been.

I am not at all the sort of person you and I took me for.

When there are two conflicting versions of the story, the wise course is to believe the one in which people appear at their worst.

Great events make me quiet and calm; it is only trifles that irritate my nerves.

A man who has nothing to do with his own time has no conscience in his intrusion on that of others.

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.

Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work.

I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

I had the capacity of imagination to momentarily escape my own pain, and I had the elegance of imagination to teach myself something true regarding the world around me, but I didn't yet have the clarity of imagination to grant myself the complicated and necessary right to suffer. I treated despair in terms of hierarchy: if there was a more important pain in the world, it meant my own was negated.

…for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.

I do not know how to live.
I do not know either but I am trying.
I do not know how to try.

I remember I turned on the light and stood in front of the mirror, looking at myself, frightened because people thought when they were getting ready for bed, and didn't think about me because I wasn't the most important thing in their lives at all.

Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one of them.