So long, 2012.

"For last year's words belong to last year's language and next year's words await another voice ... and to make an end is to make a beginning." -T.S. Eliot
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A New Year

"The time has come
To stop allowing the clutter
To clutter my mind
Like dirty snow,
Shove it off and find
Clear time, clear water." -May Sarton
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The Few

"I've always written for a small audience consisting of people like myself, who are well-educated, worldly, skeptical and snobbish (meaning that they rank good taste over bad). And who believe that nothing and nobody is special." -author Simon Raven
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Polite

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Darwinian

"Probably all organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed. There is grandeur in this view of life that ... from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved." -Charles Darwin
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Rolling

"Someone we loved has fallen from our thoughts, making a little, glittering splash like a bicycle pushed by a breeze." -Ted Kooser
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Merry Christmas

"Christmas is the season for kindling the fire of hospitality in the hall, the genial flame of charity in the heart." -Washington Irving
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To the Max

"Don't forget: more 'tude, more verve, and never chince on the good stuff." -advice from a friend.
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At Altitude

"I have always felt I was most myself in the mountains. There I have done the bulk of what is called my creative work...I find most tranquility camped by a mountain lake at timber line." -Kenneth Rexroth
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Happy Holidays

"Two kinds of gratitude: The sudden kind / we feel for what we take; the larger kind / we feel for what we give." -Edwin Arlington Robinson
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Public Speaking

"My main reason for turning into an essayist [...was] the painful fact that I stuttered so badly that writing essays was my best chance to talk." -Edward Hoagland
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Back At It

"I started back running Nov. 1. I was tired of all the aches and pains I had from not running." -Phil, after this morning's run.
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Writing

"I can't persuade myself that writing is honest work. It's great fun and I love it. For one thing, it's the only way I can get to sit down." -Shirley Jackson
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Alive

"If it's true your life flashes past your eyes before you die, then it is also the truth that your life rushes forth when you are ready to start to truly be alive." -Amy Hempel
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Friends and Enemies

"I believe that people should write biographies only about people they love, or understand, or both. Novels, on the other hand, are often better if they're about people the writer doesn't like very much." -Penelope Fitzgerald
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Hook 'Em

"I'm doing super... my grades ... they are doing okay." -text message from my youngest brother, who's in his first year of college.


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All I Want

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Work Holiday Card

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PastPresentFuture

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Progress

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The Distance

"Run often and run long, but never outrun your joy of running." -Julie Isphording, retired American long distance runner
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Unsettled

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue ... Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers." -Rainer Maria Rilke
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Tree Bug

As seen outside Starbucks.
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Winter Thoughts

"Such dear loneliness. Going along to no man's clock. No one knows my middle name for a thousand miles. Thinking back to childhood. Astonished that I could find my way here." -Jack Gilbert
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That Line

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No. 1

"But once in a while, like today, I meditate on it and realize how lucky I am to share my life with the greatest woman I ever met. You still fascinate and inspire me. You influence me for the better. You're the object of my desire, the #1 Earthly reason for my existence. I love you very much." -Johnny Cash to June Carter, 1994
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Joy

"Running has always been a relief and a sanctuary -- something that makes me feel good, both physically and mentally. For me it's not so much about the health benefits. Those are great, but I believe that the best thing about running is the joy it brings to life." -Kara Goucher
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Role Models

"I’m not a feminist, but we’ve got feminists up here. And I see some of the signs they post like they’ve just discovered feminism. And I want to say, oh, no, no, no. You really need to talk to your grandmothers, or your great-grandmothers. They know what feminism’s all about; they didn’t talk about it; they did it. They provided role models for a lot of us at various generations. It’s much more than about Rosie the Riveter; it’s about living it, taking care of your family." - quote from CC's senior-most faculty member.

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My Heart

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Runner's Xmas

Saw this on Runner's World's Facebook page. Love.
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Happy December!

Click to make larger. This is hilarious.
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Gusty

"No one wants to read your mountain-town version of Gone With the Wind, so check the forecast before hitting the slopes." -my latest on OutsideOnline.com
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Ruckus

"If you can't raise consciousness, at least raise hell." -Rita Mae Brown
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Woods vs. Sea

"The woods are never solitary -- they are full of whispering, beckoning, friendly life. But the sea is a mighty soul, forever moaning of some great, unshareable sorrow, which shuts it up into itself for all eternity. We can never pierce its infinite mystery -- we may only wander, awed and spell-bound, on the outer fringe of it. The woods call to us with a hundred voices, but the sea has one only -- a mighty voice that drowns our souls in its majestic music. The woods are human, but the sea is of the company of archangels." -another one from Anne's House of Dreams by L.M. Montgomery
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Dark and Dreary

"In November I sometimes feel as if spring could never come again." -Anne, in Anne's House of Dreams.
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One Word, Not Two

"Froufrou: Fussy or showy dress or ornamentations." -latest update to the AP Stylebook.
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A New Day

"The great secret of doctors, known only to their wives, but still hidden from the public, is that most things get better by themselves; most things, in fact, are better in the morning." -physician and essayist Lewis Thomas
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Don't Wait

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Story of my life

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Happy Thanksgiving

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Joy

"Let us read and let us dance -- two amusements that will never do any harm to the world." -Voltaire
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Snow snow snowshoe

"Do you ski?" No. Read more here.
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Bare

"I think that whenever we give our pen some free will, we may surprise ourselves. All that wanting to seem normal in regular life, all that fitting in falls away in the face of one's own strange self on that page." -Sharon Olds
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Around the World

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Open Mind

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No Fear

"I've been absolutely terrified every moment of my life -- and I've never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do." -Georgia O'Keeffe
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Limitless

"I'm an ordinary girl... marked out by, if anything, an appetite for adventure and a will for self-improvement. These are qualities available to anyone who is of a mind to acquire them." -Ironman world champ Chrissie Wellington. Just finished her book, A Life Without Limits.
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SAD

"Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) is a variation of depression that plagues normally healthy people with depressive symptoms during the winter...three out of four people who suffer from seasonal affective disorder are women." -read  more at Women's Adventure.

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There's Always Tomorrow

"Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It's perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we've learned something from yesterday." -John Wayne
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Remember

"Lord, bid war's trumpet cease; fold the whole earth in peace." -Oliver Wendell Holmes

Looking back at old Uppingham photos... here's one from the France & Belgium battlefields field trip for Remembrance Day (one day late).
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That's My Name

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Bond

"He's the suavest guy you'll ever meet, but he'll also kill you." -a co-worker describes James Bond.
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Peace

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Horizons

"You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore." -Christopher Columbus

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Stuck

"I wanted to write so much that I couldn't write a word." -Walker Evans
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Election Day

"People assume -- especially if somebody likes you or they think that you're smart -- they assume that you agree with  what they think." -excerpt from Sunday's This American Life, "Red State Blue State."
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On the Calendar

"I like deadlines. I need deadlines. I'm not a compulsive writer -- I don't write every day. I've learned not to go to the computer until I know what I want to write." -playwright Terrence McNally


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Mental

On the wall of the fitness center where yesterday's 5K started. Great quote, but do I tell the owner she spelled "you're" incorrectly? 

Also: a guy ran in the frog suit....

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November

"All of it under gray skies,
chill air, all of us waiting
in the somber dank and rain,
waiting here in quiet, chill
November,
waiting for the snow" -David Budbill
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Multiples

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Even Keeled

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Happy Halloween!

1987; Falls Church, Va.
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Simple Things

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Guts

"Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt." -Sylvia Plath


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Navajo Nation

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Freedom

"It's a treat being a runner, out in the world by yourself with not a soul to make you bad-tempered or tell you what to do." -writer Alan Sillitoe
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Baby Steps

"Every day do something that will inch you closer to a better tomorrow." - author Doug Firebaugh
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Desire

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Bitter

"Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience." -A.J.
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Moon Shoes

"That's why you're doing so well -- you're wearing Hokas!" -random guy I passed during Sunday's Dogwood Canyon 50K
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Smiles

"She just lit up the room. Blondes do that sometimes." -our admin assistant about our potential future boss. Can't say I disagree with that :)
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Even Keeled

"I haven't got any violent feelings about anything. I just love writing." -P.G. Wodehouse
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Not Very Nice

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Early Eater

"Let's make this quick, you're interrupting my dinner." -a Pulitzer-Prize-winning author after answering my phone call ... at 4:30 p.m.
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Self Aware

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Branching Out

"Move out of your comfort zone. You can only grow if you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new." -author Brian Tracy
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Crucify Your Mind

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Moving

"Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare fiddle?" -Katherine Mansfield
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I'm Sending You All My Love

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Mascot Love

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Action

"Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Actions breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy." -author Dale Carnegie
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Mind's Eye

"You never know what you'll want to write until it starts writing itself in your head." -Jill Ker Conway
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Proactive

"Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do." -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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USA

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Flying

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Books

"A book is like a man -- clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun." -John Steinbeck
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A Mess

"If you organize chaos, you organize as much as you can to show that it's chaos. It's the way I do it. To pretend it's not chaotic is a lie." -Irwin Shaw
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Informed

"Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent." -Gore Vidal
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Going Back

"All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the love to the love he has forsaken." -Thomas Wolfe
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Aware

"Manners are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others. If you have that awareness, you have good manners, no matter what fork you use." -Emily Post
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Amen

"I love a good wedding just as I love any part with an open bar and "The Electric Slide." But unless you are wealthy, come from a family that has never known strife, enjoy giving up an entire year of your life to planning, and can smile in the face of any possible wedding disaster (and mean it, not just for pictures), you should elope. That's because weddings -- even small-scale ones -- are more pageant than sincerity." -article on Slate.
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On the Road

As seen driving around Columbia.
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The Life

"We runners talk about having fun but I don't think anybody believes us. We talk about discipline and endurance, we take care, we exercise caution, we watch our diets and monitor our pace. We are ascetics who talk, unconvincingly, of the bracing enjoyment of self-abuse." -Peter Sagal

Recovering from Rock Bridge Revenge today....

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Do Unto Others

"If you do a good job for others, you heal yourself at the same time, because a dose of joy is a spiritual cure. It transcends all barriers." -Ed Sullivan
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Last Day

"As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation." -William Faulkner, October 1924, quitting his job as a University of Mississippi postmaster.
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Aging

Birthday tomorrow...

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...And I Love Buddha, Too

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I Wonder

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Experience

"Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted. And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer." -Randy Pausch in The Last Lecture.
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Bluesy

"I just imported it from my brain into the atmosphere." -ESMZ front-man Alex Ebert at Roots N Blues. He was talking about a made-up word, which, of course, I don't remember. Great show and great back up of Rodriguez earlier in the evening.

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Festival Day

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Sandwich Board

On Walnut Street in downtown Columbia, outside a law office.
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Here, Now

"I am not religious so that I have no apprehension of a hereafter, either a hope of reward or a fear of punishment. It is not a matter of belief. It is what I feel to be true from my experience, observation and simple tissue feeling." -John Steinbeck, in a letter to his new physician, 1964.
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Ernest

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Striving for Certainty

"These swings between boldness and mistrust, intimacy and isolation led him to stay at home, keep himself concealed, becoming a sort of hermit, whose passion for the world directed every brushstroke, changed each creation into an expression of tenderness, which he dismissed writing: 'a vague sense of apprehension persists.'" -Cezanne's Seclusion by Stephen Dobyns.
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Moving On

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Election Day

"The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for the confusion." -Molly Ivins
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Days

"What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields." -Philip Larken



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Preservation

"My health may be better preserved if I exert myself less, but in the end doesn't each person give his life for his calling?" -composer & pianist Clara Schumann
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Local

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Like a Mighty River

"And that's how we measure out our real respect for people -- by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate -- and enjoy. End of sermon. As Buddha says: live like a mighty river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you." -poet Ted Hughes in a letter to his son.
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Positive Contributions

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Now

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Bike Butts

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Roots

"If you don't know who you are, you don't know where you're going. If you don't know where you're going, you're lost." -good quote from a Miss Navajo hopeful on NPR
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Logic

"Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting another person to die." -Buddha
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Book Brain

"Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that make what we read ours." -John Locke
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Stuff

"I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they're right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together." -Marilyn Monroe
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Today and Everyday

"One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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Marathon Monday

Heart of America today.
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Busy Minds

"Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad." -Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.


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Oink

"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it." -George Bernard Shaw
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Effort

"With ordinary talent and extraordinary perseverance, all things are attainable." - Sir Thomas Foxwell Buxton, British philanthropist and politician
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Rewrite

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Running Violations

Click to enlarge.
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Stand Tall

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The Familiar

"What I find to be very bad advice is the sappy little sentence, 'Write what you know.' It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply what we know we never grow." -Annie Proulx
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Odd Melon

I don't know why my watermelon looks like a peanut.
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