“Remember where you are and adjust yourself accordingly, not vice-versa ... otherwise, you might be toast.”

“Being an idealist is not being a simpleton; without idealists there would be no optimism and without optimism there would be no courage to achieve advances that so-called realists would have you believe could never come to fruition.”

“There's a cover for every pot, but I've never seen so many mismatched pots and covers in all my life. - Ellen Wasserfeldman, from Notes from Ellen Wasserfeldman by Alisa Dana Steinberg”

“I don't watch reality TV, my reality is tough enough.”

“Mental Note #50: The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, even though it most desperately wants to. - Notes from Ellen Wasserfeldman”

“The space itself - its piles of papers representing decades of tangled history - reminded me of all that I didn't know and couldn't know. This itself is part of the wisdom of archives. By creating a finite space, where some things are included, some omitted, an archive challenges you to examine its dusty spaces, but more importantly, to search for what has been entirely left out.”

“Fuck it, I thought. As Don Rumsfeld once said, "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had.”