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Archives - December 2000

December 1, 2000

What was given to us by the past is adapted to the possibilities of the future.

– Carl Jung

December 2, 2000

Once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle, you are equipped with the basic means of salvation.

– Tennessee Williams

December 3, 2000

Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell.

– Frank Borman

December 4, 2000

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

– W.H. Auden

December 5, 2000

Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that crushed it.

– Mark Twain

December 6, 2000

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

– Catherine Drinker Bowen

December 7, 2000

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers.

– Tennyson, LOCKSLEY HALL

December 8, 2000

Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.

– Maya Angelou

December 9, 2000

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are somone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

– Oscar Wilde

December 10, 2000

If the fine arts and the humanities really didn't matter, then most of what we call civilization has been a mistake.

– Unknown

December 11, 2000

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.

– Hannah Arendt

December 12, 2000

I need to love my enemies; I made them.

– Red Skelton

December 13, 2000

The New England conscience…does not stop you from doing what you shouldn't— it just stops you from enjoying it.

– Cleveland Amory

December 14, 2000

A little fact is worth a whole limbo of dreams.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

December 15, 2000

Politics: where fat, bald, disagreeable men, unable to be candidates themselves, teach a president how to act on a public stage.

– Jimmy Breslin

December 16, 2000

There isn't, unfortunately, any way of discovering whether you can write a publishable novel except by writing it.

– John Braine

December 17, 2000

No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement.

– Florida Scott-Maxwell

December 18, 2000

The penalty of success is to be bored by people who used to snub you.

– Lady Astor

December 19, 2000

If you travel faster than the speed of light, will you still be left in the dark?

– Unknown

December 20, 2000

My soul can find no staircase to heaven unless it be through Earth's loveliness.

– Michelangelo

December 21, 2000

To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.

– Robert Graves

December 22, 2000

The voice of the sea speaks to the soul.

– Kate Chopin

December 23, 2000

"Literature" is written material that, 100 years after the death of the author, is forced upon high school students.

– Tom Clancy

December 24, 2000

I am not so much concerned with the right of everyone to say anything he pleases as I am about our need as self-governing people to hear everything.

– John F. Kennedy

December 25, 2000

A perfectly managed Christmas correct in every detail is, like basted inside seams and letters answered by return, a sure sign of someone who hasn't enough to do.

– Katherine Whitehorn

December 26, 2000

No law can be sacred to me buy that of my nature.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

December 27, 2000

True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.

– Clarence S. Darrow

December 28, 2000

Motherhood is like Albania--you can't trust the description in the books, you have to go there.

– Marni Jackson

December 29, 2000

Number is an invention meant to atone for a bad memory.

– Madeline Gins

December 30, 2000

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact.

– William Shakespeare

December 31, 2000

The etiquette question that troubles so many fastidious people New Year's Day is: How am I ever going to face those people again?

– Judith Martin