Patrick Stewart:

And every week two women are killed by a current or former partner in England and Wales, and 10 women take their own lives as the only way they know how to escape a violent partner.

David Brooks:

For reasons having to do with the peculiarities of our civilization, we pay a great deal of attention to our scholastic educations, which are formal and supervised, and we devote much less public thought to our emotional educations, which are unsupervised and haphazard. This is odd, since our emotional educations are much more important to our long-term happiness and the quality of our lives.

Hyde Park, London, November 2009

Green Park, London, November 2009

one study has shown that when people use the word “most”, they don’t just mean more than 50%; specifically they mean 80-95%.

for example, when they say “women are mostly scary”, they mean out of 10 women, 8 or 9 of them are scary.

which is why i leave out the word mostly.

[via Barking up the wrong tree]

Werner Herzog:

I try to understand the ocean beneath the thin layer of ice that is civilization. There’s miles and miles of deep ocean, of darkness and barbarism. And I know the ice can break easily.

there is this theory, believed by many, that doing is more important than not doing.

action speaks louder than words. don’t just stand there, do something. seize the day.

as for me, the things I did not do – did not take credit, did not defend myself, did not spend that money, did not become an asshole, did not lecture, did not expose secrets, did no harm – these are the things i am happiest about.

Stephen King:

When the narrator of “The Fling” finally faces up to the fact that he has no love or comfort to give his father, he says of himself, “I was all smooth surface with nothing inside except emptiness.”

Colum McCann on winning the National Book Award:

As fiction writers and people who believe in the word, we have to enter the anonymous corners of human experience to make that little corner right.

(or the day i was defeated by ice cream)

Harrods, Nov 2009