Identity

"I don't want to be treated as Sands the Brit, Sands the European, Sands the liberal, Sands the Jew. I want to be treated as Sands. And we all want that. But actually it's never going to happen. It's impossible to get away from that tribal group connection."

Philippe Sands, NYTimes fall 2016

Selling farming supplies in New York, Texas

The couple's business cards include their home phone number, "for urgent fertiizer situations." The store is the Reynolds New York Store.

Prep for a hurricane

"A Miami native scoured the shelves at Publix with her teenage son and her son's friend. The teenagers had won the day: there were bottles of Gatorade, a jar of Nutella, cases of Pepsi and Mountain Dew and chocolate Krave cereal."

NYTimes, 10/6/2016

Q: How do you battle Parkinson's?
A: "I don't look at life as a battle or as a fight. I don't think I'm scrappy. I'm accepting. I say "living with" or "working through" Parkinson's. Acceptance doesn't mean resignation; it means understanding that something is what it is and that there's got to be a way through it. I look at it like I'm a fluid that's finding the fissures and cracks and flowing through."

--Michael J. Fox interview in Parade, April 1, 2012

Umberto Eco

"His novels demanded readers absorb heavy doses of semiotic ruminations."
In Eco's obit in the NY Times. February 2016

Muriel Barbery

Fiction suited her better than philosophy, a field where "you have to enjoy fighting and you have to enjoy being right."
NYTimes, February 20, 2016 or so

Chicago Cub Chris Coghlan

"Staying in the present is hard to do. Nobody does it perfectly--I don't at all. It's a natural tendency for humans to worry and to doubt and to fear and have anxiety about the future. But I think as I've gotten older I've learned to take those thoughts captive and to try to really challenge myself to stay more in te moment of, 'OK, today is what I've been given. I'm going to try to do the best I can do today and not worry about tomorrow.' And then when tomorrow comes do the same thing again."

"That's life, man. It's just the journey--that's what it's about. For me, it's been so much of not getting caught up in what I want to conquer. You just try to enjoy the journey you've been given."

--Chicago Tribune, September 7, 2015