Every Stone a Story

Don’t talk to yourself in such a way that if you did so to a friend, it would end your friendship.

If you had a friend dealing with the same things, you wouldn’t berate that person, say, ‘You’re not working hard enough,’ ‘You suck,’ or ‘You’re not as good as [whomever].’ You’d offer your friend encouragement, you’d try to point out all the things your friend did right, and how much progress your friend had made.

You should do no less for yourself.

Be very careful how you talk to yourself. Because *you are listening.*

--Pat Cadigan

I might change "citizens" to "multinational corporations."

Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.

— Kurt Vonnegut (God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater)

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. The point is, live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without ever noticing it, live your way into the answer.

--Rainer Maria Rilke