“Both groups [of pundits] were critics, and that is the heart of the problem. If you are a pundit, you seem so smart when you are telling the President what he did wrong… This [is] mostly BS.”

“Practice, practice, practice writing. Writing is a craft that requires both talent and acquired skills. You learn by doing, by making mistakes and then seeing where you went wrong.”

“I've always found that one of the biggest benefits of being a girl is that most people refuse to take you seriously. While boys must be constantly monitored and are always the first suspects when anything goes wrong, everyone expects girls to do what they're told. It may seem a little insulting at first, but low expectations can be a blessing in disuise. If you're smart, you can use people's foolishness to your own advantage. It's amazing what you can get away with when no one bothers watching.”

“MAGGIE, in pain: That’s what I mean; I’m a joke to most people.QUENTIN: No, it’s that you say what you mean, Maggie. You don’t seem to be upholding anything, you’re not—ashamed of what you are.MAGGIE: W-what do you mean, of what I am?… But you didn’t, did you?He turns to her in agony.Laugh at me?QUENTIN: No. He suddenly stands and cries out to Listener. Fraud! From the first five minutes! …Because! I should have agreed she was a joke, a beautiful piece, trying to take herself seriously! Why did I lie to her, play this cheap benefactor, this— Listens, and now unwillingly he turns back to her.MAGGIE: Like when you told me to fix where my dress was torn? You wanted me to be— proud of myself. Didn’t you?”

“Death was a beast with no teeth. He did not fear death.”

“Most of our failures in understanding one another have less to do with what is heard than with what is intended and what is inferred.”

“Ecology is beginning to slowly shift focus with tentative explorations of what the world would look like if process, rather than matter were the basis for reality What if we defined a species in terms of its life processes? We might seriously doubt whether the California condor or the tall grass prairie can be 'saved' or even 'restored.' Perhaps we can re-create some local conditions that foster a few nests of condors or a few acres of prairie. But the life process of the condor ended with the urbanization of the California foothills and the living ebb and flow of the tall grass prairies died with the plowing of the Great Plains. What if we suggested that a thing is what it does? In this light, the Rocky Mountain locust was a immense aperiodic energy flow that linked life processes on a continental scale.This notion of life-as-process might seem unusual in a society in which material existence is primary. But such a perception informs our deepest understanding of life. Indeed, life-as-process underlies our notion of euthanasia. When loved ones are simply bodies, devoid of the capacity to care, respond, or relate again a away that we can recognize as being "them," we understand that they are gone even before they are dead.”