It's really only a piece of a quote.

Here's the other piece, which also does a pretty good job pretending to be a full quote:

I am not especially satisfied with my own imaginative works, my fiction. I am simply impressed by the unexpected insights which shower down on me when my job is to imagine, as contrasted with the woodenly familiar ideas which clutter my desk when my job is to tell the truth.

I guess it's time to start writing fiction.

Arms spread, festooned with blinking insects, he imagined that he was an airplane, or a rock star, the deeper beauty of the gift eluding him.

Chris Abani wrote that, in The Virgin of Flames.

I tried to post the quote on Twitter, but it's one character too long - or, three characters too long, if you count the quotation marks.

And I'm glad. Better to have it here. People read their Twitter feeds pretty fast, which I think would make the deeper beauty too elusive.

It's a 28 year old son living with his 73 year old father and writing down "the shit that he says."

A taste...

"The dog don't like you planting stuff there. It's his backyard. If you're the only one who shits in something, you own it. Remember that."

Having spiritual and philosophical concepts is all good, but if you don't apply it to advanced physics and mathematics and technology, you still have a problem. You still have pollution. You still have all sorts of problem - water raising, you know - that you may be able to solve if you apply the higher concepts.

Nassim Haramein* is the speaker, and Crossing the Event Horizon is the speech.

My uncle Kim, the pirate, told me to watch it, told me it'd blow my mind, told me Nassim reminded him of me.

I think I'm flattered. And skeptical of my lack of skepticism for dudes with statement-making pony tails. And totally fascinated by that quote.

*From that Wikipedia page (one that seems to be the home of a little controversy): "Any attempt to delete this information is a blatant attempt to prevent a wealth of knowledge - that is peer-reviewed - from reaching the masses."

And I often misquote that scene.  My Kip voice always says:

You're just jealous because I've been chatting online with hot babes all afternoon

Which is almost the right line.  Not quite.  But close.  Not sure if I'm going to stick with my version or adjust for accuracy.  Not easy to stray from a sentence you've grown to love.

Art teaches nothing but the significance of life itself.

But, according to the internets, that's not quite the quote.  What Henry Miller actually wrote was this:

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

And that, the real quote, in my opinion, lacks the rhythm of its misremembered cousin.

Not sure what that means.  But I've certainly experienced it before.  And I like it.  I'm glad we do it.  I'm excited for the next time I get to see it in action.

I quote below from an American nerd athlete artist.  He's relieved at the American electorate's ability to choose the intellectual candidate.  But his comment intends to celebrate neither American nor Chinese culture.

We live in a country where the nerd gets beaten up in middle school.  In China, the nerd is the bully.

I did not know this about China when I lived there.  I never saw it happen, never heard stories about it until today.  But it does make sense.  Good grades earn big teacher love and, with it, positions of authority in classrooms.  And there doesn't exist a school-connected athletic infrastructure to balance the power.  Validation comes first for the successfully academic minds and significantly later, if at all, for anyone else.

Anyone have any experience with this?  I'd love to know more.

This one's my favorite.  It's a conversation between roommates.  L is a girl.  W is a boy. 

L: I have a moral dillema.
W: Take the money.
L: No, it's not like that...
W: Sleep with both of them.
L: No, not that either, but now I'm distracted.

BusinessWeek's Election Blog just posted this.  About a softball game. And a metaphor.

If we're going to save the world and remain sane while we do it, we're going to have to be able to keep laughing.

Thinking about this and writing those last few sentences convinced me to search back into my email to find one of my favorite rock and roll quotes.

I found it, and I think the little bit of context from my email is kind of fun too, so I'm posting both.  It's fun to think back to more than a year ago when we were first considering the possibility of pursuing The Carrot Project (or whatever we were calling it back then), and, as always, it's hugely inspiring to read that quote.

"I'm working on these interfaces and adding text where text is due, and since I don't actually KNOW anything about what I'm writing, I'm just kind of being silly, and being silly has sent this totally excellent quote running through my head.  It's from Stephen Stills of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young: