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Archives - January 2001

January 1, 2001

All that I have written seems to me like straw compared to what has now been revealed to me.

– St. Thomas Aquinas

January 2, 2001

The Soul should always stand ajar.

– Emily Dickinson, <strong>Poems by Emily Dickinson</strong> (1896)

January 3, 2001

Each time someone stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, they send forward a ripple of hope.

– Robert F. Kennedy

January 4, 2001

A poet looks at the world as a man looks at a woman.

– Wallace Stevens, <strong>Opus Posthumous: Adagia</strong> (1957)

January 5, 2001

Wit is the salt of conversation, not the food.

– William Hazlitt, <strong>Lectures on the English Comic Writer (1951)</strong>

January 6, 2001

He who would write and can't write can surely review.

– James Russell Lowell, <strong>A Fable for Critics (1848)</strong>

January 7, 2001

Letters...have souls.

– Heloise, <strong>The World's Greatest Letters (1940)</strong>

January 8, 2001

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

– Ray Bradbury

January 9, 2001

Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.

– Dalai Lama

January 10, 2001

In matters of great importance, style, not sincerity, is a vital thing.

– Oscar Wilde, <strong>The Importance of Being Earnest</strong>

January 11, 2001

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

– Mark Twain, <strong>Mark Twain's Speeches (1923)</strong>

January 12, 2001

A willfully ignorant person is a corrupt government's best slave.

– Unknown

January 13, 2001

Lives that flash in sunshine, and lives that are born in tears, receive their hue from circumstances.

– Harriet A. Jacobs, <strong>Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl</strong>

January 14, 2001

I am part of all that I have met.

– Tennyson

January 15, 2001

A man who won't die for something is not fit to live.

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

January 16, 2001

The hearts that never lean, must fall.

– Emily Dickinson

January 17, 2001

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

– Scott Adams, creator of <strong>Dilbert</strong>

January 18, 2001

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

– George Eliot, <strong>Daniel Deronda</strong>

January 19, 2001

Democracies are most commonly corrupted by the insolence of demagogues.

– Aristotle

January 20, 2001

Perversity is the muse of modern literature.

– Susan Sontag, <strong>Against Interpretation (1966)</strong>

January 21, 2001

Birth is the start / of loneliness / & loneliness the start / of poetry.

– Erica Jong, &quot;Dear Marys, Dear Mother, Dear Daughter,&quot; <strong>Loveroot (1975)</strong>

January 22, 2001

Morality is a test of our conformity rather than our integrity.

– Jane Rule, in Alan Twigg, <strong>For Openers (1981)</strong>

January 23, 2001

Ignorance is the mother of presumption.

– Marie de Gournay, <strong>The Ladies' Grievance (1626)</strong>

January 24, 2001

Necessity does the work of courage.

– George Eliot

January 25, 2001

History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.

– quoted by Richard Nixon to Barbara Walters (1985)

January 26, 2001

Who profits from all this writing activity? The manufacturers of the typewriters and typing paper, of course. And the U.S. Post Office.

– William Targ, <strong>Indecent Pleasures (1975)</strong>

January 27, 2001

My true friends have always given me that supreme proof of devotion, a spontaneous aversion for the man I love.

– Colette

January 28, 2001

Racism is used both to create false differences among us and to mask very significant ones.

– Mirtha Quintanales, <strong>This Bridge Called My Back (1983)</strong>

January 29, 2001

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

– Ray Bradbury

January 30, 2001

In America the word revolutionary is used to sell pantyhose.

– Rita Mae Brown

January 31, 2001

Sex annihilates identity, and the space given to sex in contemporary novels is an avowal of the absence of character.

– Mary McCarthy, <strong>On the Contrary (1961)</strong>