Maiocco Blog Quotes

We have, each of us, a story that is uniquely ours, a narrative arc that we can walk with purpose once we figure out what it is. It's the opposite to living our lives episodically, where each day is only tangentially connected to the next, where we are ourselves the only constants linking yesterday to tomorrow. There is nothing wrong with that, and I don't want to imply that there is by saying how much this shocked me
just that it felt so suddenly, painfully right to think that I have tapped into my Long Tale, that I have set my feet on the path I want to walk the rest of my life, and that it is a path of stories and writing and that no matter how many oceans I cross or how transient I feel in any given place, I am still on my Tale's Road, because having tapped it, having found it, the following is inevitable ... ~ Amal El-Mohtar

The process of making a movie has expanded in terms of effort and time for the director, doing commentaries for the DVD for example, finishing deleted scenes so they could be on the DVD, and doing things like a web blog. ~ David Cronenberg

When it comes to the self in becoming, the greatest enrichment another person can bring to your life is the gift of enabling you to be yourself, and the influence of helping that self reach its full potential. With this comes the freedom for that real self to grow. Whether in the form of a friend, family member or a beloved, those who will be true blessings to us are those with whom we can diminish our social affectations, cast off our fears and insecurities, break free the shackles of unnaturalness that the social world brings to bear on us, and be freed from the yoke of impressing on others the artificial selves we create for the watching world. Stay close to the ones who can help bring out all the facets of the excellent self that's inside you - for then you will delight in the freedom to shine. ~ James Knight - The Philosophical Muser Blog

You know, some of the good part of blog theory was that blogs would be like diaries that the world could read. They would be spontaneous, whatever pops into your mind, as a diary would be. ~ Gregg Easterbrook

What are the purposes of modern-day schools? The primary purpose is warehousing -- keeping children off the streets, out of the workplace, and out of the home for most of the day to the benefit of parents, some employers, and the general public. Call it the "jail function" as John Holt put it frankly. There is no attempt to cloak this fact. In a blog post bemoaning the number of days her children have off from school, one blogger's headline read: "November Is the Cruelest Month for Moms".

The second purpose is teaching children how to comply with orders, submit to authority, and fit into our consumerist, capitalist economy. This is not usually acknowledged. Schools, educators, and policymakers are not candidly saying that the objective of schools is to produce compliant students, but that's generally what happens.

The third purpose is ranking and sorting students based on their performance in school. It's an efficient way to determine who should be rewarded for her compliance, or in other words, who should go to the top colleges and universities and later hold positions of power and influence and society. As the eminent linguist Noam Chomsky once put it, "The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.

The fourth is a distor ~ Nikhil Goyal

The Olympic Games are for 'the youth of the world,' but they're organized and scored by countries. It's no surprise that countries treat them as vehicles of national pride, and assume that their people will be most interested in their own athletes. So anybody who was saving up to write an angry letter, blog post, or op-ed about NBC's chauvinistic coverage: don't bother! They're actually more above-the-fray than most. Also, their coverage is not shown anywhere except America - I know, it's because I can't get it that I'm watching Women's Air Pistol - so can't ruffle feathers elsewhere. ~ James Fallows

My blog readership grew steadily as I started to dump more of my inner self onto the page. I ~ Amanda Palmer

If you want to fight the evil you see in finance and industry, get to work reading the corporate filings, see if there has been fraud, and where you find it, report it to the SEC or write about it or blog about it. ~ Ben Stein

The blog is certainly another tool for writers out there to break their way in. But being a blogger does not make you a great writer. ~ Julie Powell

Female readers, on the other hand, were unmoved by the book, one of them going so far as to give it the ultimate insult on a well-trafficked book blog: She "flung it across the room. ~ Deborah Copaken Kogan

A midst deceit I found the truth;
there in the rough I found a diamond.
And from the moment we met,
I think of no one else
Today I choose to be, to live and breathe;
to dream, to weep, and to sing in free verse.
And you, the object of my delight:
a like-minded opposite I am myself with,
a mind-fuck times six, seven, eight thousand and three.
I know that you love me with every inch of your deep. ~ Donato DiCristino

Although it is easier to find information these days, it is easier than ever before to find misinformation, pseudo-facts, unsupported and fringe opinions, and the like. Children should be taught at an early age what constitutes evidence, how to detect biases or distortions in newspaper accounts, and that there exist hierarchies of information sources. In the medical field, for example, a controlled experiment published in a peer-reviewed journal is a better source than a blog by the Ginseng Growers Association, promoting the health benefits of their own product. ~ Daniel Levitin

I've been blogging since February of 2001. When I started blogging, it was a dinosaur blog. It was me and a handful of tyrannosaurs. We'd be writing blog entries like, 'The tyrannosaurus is getting grumpy.' ~ Neil Gaiman

You need to update your blog a couple of times a week. You need to post a Twitter here and there. It feels so dumb to say that stuff, but it's important for me to keep that presence going. ~ Nick Thune

My fans don't feel like I hold anything back from them. They know whatever I'm going through now, they'll hear about it on a record someday. They'll hear the real story. There's a little bit of lag time. It's not as instant as going on a gossip blog. But it's much more accurate. ~ Taylor Swift

«Brixie's blog was huge. That had to be it. Brixie had a monster fashion blog. All those Los Angeles girls with their feet on the pedals of daddy's sports car... Speedometers twitched in Milan whenever those girls changed their shoes... And Brixie knew how to make the girls in L.A. change their shoes.
Dr. Gustav Y. Svante had warned him about this. This was an Internet thing: "disintermediation."» ~ Bruce Sterling

Life wears us down around the edges. The stress of life and its neces­sities cracks things. We learn to protect ourselves. We learn not to let so much of the world in, because some­times it's all too much, and we don't have the resilience we need to survive it. When we're six, we make best friends easily. When we're fifty, we don't. That's age and expe­rience for you.

But books are different. We can let books in. We can wrap them up in our hearts. We can approach them as if we're still young and open. Even so, it's not as simple. Because we're not as simple.

(Source: State of the Writer, sort of, September 2015 - blog post) ~ Michelle Sagara

It seems to me that the greatest triumph of any human rights movement, be it fighting for racial, religious, sexual or gender equality – is to achieve that moment where eyes are opened so wide that a sort of blindness sets in. I don't care if someone is black, white, gay or straight. I don't care if a woman has children or no – I just want to know who they are. [...] At the end of the day, gender differences seem to me to be just a tiny, tiny drop in the great expanse of things that make people unique. Unique, not 'different', not 'other' merely another piece of that great teaming mass that makes up the wonderfully rich, thrillingly varied definition of 'humanity'."

[Playing Butch: Blog entry, February 24, 2014] ~ Kate Griffin

Value the quality of your articles over the number of articles you write. I know a lot of bloggers focus on writing as many articles as possible, but I've realized over the years that you cannot sacrifice quality if you wish to build a loyal following on your blog. ~ Jeet Banerjee

Norns are incredible architects. They simply use death as a building block. Andacellus, Viddion marah. ~ Taylor Grace

Read and write all the time. Never stop sending out your stuff. If you're constantly writing and sending stuff out, eventually someone will bite. ~ Meg Cabot

I would love to blog daily but I have not been making time for it because my internet is very slow. Everyone should make time for writing. ~ Jason Mraz

Now the truth is, writing is a great way to deal with a lot of difficult emotional issues. It can be very therapeutic, but that's best done in your journal, or on your blog if you're an exhibitionist. Trying to put a bunch of *specific* stuff from your personal life into your story usually just isn't appropriate unless you're writing a memoir or a personal essay or something of the sort. ~ Patrick Rothfuss

The journal is written to everyone and thus to no one. ~ Sherry Turkle

At last we've seen the first installment of Joss Whedon's new web series, 'Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog,' and it's sweeter than we'd ever imagined. ~ Annalee Newitz

You don't really have to believe what you write in a blog for more than the moment when you're writing it. You don't bring the same solemnity that you would bring to an actual essay. ~ Nora Ephron

I start reading every Elizabeth Wurtzel essay with optimism, like maybe finally she put her talent to writing about something than herself, and by the end of paragraph three that optimism has fled. So maybe you know Wurtzel has written an essay for New York Magazine? Probably you know, because for whatever reason, Wurtzel provokes a deep need in people to talk about how much they hate Wurtzel. So the comments are hundreds deep, Twitter is ablaze, and here I am, writing this blog post.

And actually, she reminds me of Mary MacLane. She was a 19-year-old girl who wrote a memoir called I Await the Devil's Coming in 1901 and it was an instant success. I wrote the introduction to the upcoming reissue, and there I talk about what a deeply interesting book it was. Not only "for its time," but also it's just kind of visceral and nasty and snarling, yet elegantly written.

I kept thinking about MacLane, after the introduction got handed in and things went off to press. But this time, it wasn't her writing that interested me, it was the way she never wrote anything very interesting ever again. She got stunted, somehow, winning all of that acclaim for being a young, sour thing. And I wondered if it was the fame that stunted her, because she spent the rest of her career spitting out copies of the memoir that made her famous. And it worked, until it didn't. ~ Jenna Crispin

If you put up a blog, people can cut out the middle man and get material to you. Which is really helpful because a lot of time there's really cool stuff out there that we just don't see. Because, y'know, the agent is acting in our best interest, but it does sometimes prevent some of the good stuff from getting through. ~ Zach Galligan

Being a famous writer is great. But there is a limit for it. For what extend can you be famous, and what would you achieve? True, your books will be best sellers, your blog writings and tweets will be hits, fans will love you, and what next? We all die to reach 'there' as budding writers, but once we reach 'it', we think, what next? Is this what we wanted all our lives? To grab all the leading awards, write best sellers, to be loved, to be known and heard? Will they help us achieve inner peace? I believe the utmost important thing is achieving inner peace, not money and fame. A writer should write to achieve inner peace forgetting all other things. Money, fame, fans are not going to last forever, but inner peace is. ~ Ama H. Vanniarachchy

A call for authors... to arms!!!
(Actually, to pens.) O_O

Check out my latest blog post (via my profile), for more faboo 411!!!

Fear ye NOT the contest!!! ~ William McDonald