Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore Quotes

We all cultivated critique--we were dogmatic in our alliances, self-righteous in our beliefs. But the broader Mission dyke culture we called queer, so much of it was about loyalty at any cost. Loyalty could mean safety but it could also mean reenacting high school popularity contests and taking on the victors' roles. High school was only a few years in the past for most of us, even if we might have been scandalized if anyone had mentioned that. Accountability only occurred when people would get in dramatic fights, and it was more about whose team was stronger or more popular than about what actually happened. ~ Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

For folks who have that casual-dude energy coursing through their bloodstream, that's great. But gays should not grow up alienated just for us to alienate each other. It's too predictable, like any other cycle of abuse. Plus, the conformist, competitive notion that by "toning down" we are "growing up" ultimately blunts the radical edge of what it is to be queer; it truncates our colorful journey of identity.

Said another way, it's like living in West Hollywood and working a gay job by day and working it in the gay nightlife, wearing delicate shiny shirts picked from up the gay dry cleaners, yet coquettishly left unbuttoned to reveal the pec implants purchased from a gay surgeon and shown off by prancing around the gay-owned-and-operated theater hopped up on gay health clinic steroids and wheat grass purchased from the friendly gay boy who's new to the city, and impressed by the monstrous SUV purchased from a gay car dealership with its rainbow-striped bumper sticker that says "Celebrate Diversity." Then logging on to the local Gay.com listings and describing yourself as "straight-acting."

Let me make myself clear. This is not a campaign for everyone to be like me. That'd be a total yawn. Instead, this narrative is about praise for the prancy boys. Granted, there's undecided gender-fucks, dagger dykes, faux-mos, po-mos, FTMs, fisting-top daddies, and lezzie looners who also need props for broadening the sexual spectrum, but they're telling their own stor ~ Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

U.S. society, after all, continues to be starkly segregated along class and race lines, never allowing people to have the sort of interactions necessary to undo prejudices, stereotypes, and oppressions. ~ Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

cruise the ones in the flesh, not the ghosts on the internet ~ Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Every time a trick hangs up on me, I gain a renewed faith in humanity - someone really cares! ~ Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Many years ago I sent an old, beloved jacket to a cleaner, the Sycamore Cleaners. It was a leather jacket covered in Guinness and blood and marmalade, one of those jobs ... and it came back with a little note pinned to it, and on the note it said, 'It distresses us to return work which is not perfect.' So that will do for me. That can go on my tombstone. ~ Peter O'Toole

An Egyptian medical scroll dating back at least 1,500 years BCE recommended treating migraines by using an electric catfish. In other cultures, electric eels were wrapped around a migraineur's head to ease the pain. ~ Carolyn Bernstein

Never speak more clearly than you think. ~ Jeremy Bernstein

The essence of effective portfolio construction is the use of a large number of poorly correlated assets. ~ William J. Bernstein

Take action once a day to do something that ignites your life. ~ Gabrielle Bernstein

Maybe there wasn't, after all, a clear motivation for any of the things that people did. Maybe they just did them for no reason at all or because of stupidity or selfishness or cowardice or anger or for reasons that made no rational sense - because the clouds happened to be a particularly gloomy shade of gray that day, because the barking of an old dog chained to a sycamore tree just happened to sound exactly like the crunch of soldiers' boots on gravel or the hum of bees like an engine in the head driving you mad. ~ John Gregory Brown

The great paradox is that our lack of faith in love and miracles is what blocks us from receiving love and miracles. ~ Gabrielle Bernstein

It was one of those golden autumn afternoons and there were blackberries and splashes of old man's beard in the hedges, and the hawthorn berries were ripening scarlet for the birds when the cold winter came along. There were tall trees here and there on either side, oak and sycamore and ash and occasionally a sweet chestnut. ~ Roald Dahl

The universe will always remove what is no longer serving you. ~ Gabrielle Bernstein

But in that first flush of victory and happiness and relief, and God knows what other emotions were involved in this great moment, we were all very much one, and we were all in a state of euphoria, drunk with our happiness. ~ Harry Bernstein

Miracle Message #6: Relationships are assignments for optimal growth and healing. #MiraclesNow ~ Gabrielle Bernstein

I hate you, Richard Wagner ... but I hate you on my knees. ~ Leonard Bernstein

You can sit there, tense and worried, freezing the creative energies, or you can start writing something. It doesn't matter what. In five or ten minutes, the imagination will heat, the tightness will fade, and a certain spirit and rhythm will take over. ~ Leonard Bernstein

Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune. ~ Leonard Bernstein

The crickets were rubbing their hind legs together, unrolling that endless band of sound that when combined with the sound of the sycamore trees losing their heads in the heat-thickened breeze could cause even a girl as unsentimental as Mary to feel like she'd just left something behind on the porch stoop she couldn't bear to live without. ~ Kathryn Davis

The second fiddle. I can get plenty of first violinists, but to find someone who can play the second fiddle with enthusiasm ~ Leonard Bernstein

The economic interpretation of history does not necessarily mean that all events are determined solely by economic forces. It simply means that economic facts are the ever recurring decisive forces, the chief points in the process of history. ~ Eduard Bernstein

It's time we learned the truth about stress. It's time we identified the thoughts that actually create our stress and learned to dismantle them one by one. ~ Andrew J. Bernstein

Woodward said that he had told no one the name of Deep Throat.
Mrs. Graham paused. 'Tell me,' she said.
Woodward froze. He said he would give her the name if she wanted. He was praying she wouldn't press it. Mrs. Graham laughed, touched his arm and said she was only kidding, she didn't really want to carry that burden around with her. Woodward took a bite of his eggs, which were cold.
Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward ~ Carl Bernstein

Children must receive music instruction as naturally as food, with as much pleasure as they derive from a ball game, and this must happen from the beginning of their lives. ~ Leonard Bernstein

Any great art work ... revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air. ~ Leonard Bernstein

The easiest way to get rich is to spend as little as possible. ~ William J. Bernstein

The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together - with a thin paste of flour and water ... I don't think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky ... but if you want to speak of a composer, that's another matter. ~ Leonard Bernstein

Rosenfeld went to work for the Herald Tribune after his graduation from Syracuse University and has always been an editor, never a reporter. He was inclined to worry that too many reporters on the metropolitan staff were incompetent, and thought even the best reporters could be saved from self-destruction only by the skills of an editor. His natural distrust of reporters was particularly acute on the Watergate story, where the risks were very great, and he was in the uncomfortable position of having to trust Bernstein and Woodward more than he had ever trusted any reporters.

-- Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward ~ Carl Bernstein

Allow your passion to become your purpose, and it will one day become your profession. ~ Gabrielle Bernstein

In ancient societies, the law functioned as a two-edged sword; while standardizing procedure and bringing it out into the open, the law also concentrated power in those few who could read and write. ~ William J. Bernstein

When one has looked upon Jesus, though he be of little stature like Zacchaeus of old (cf. Lk. 19:3), and climb up on the top of the sycamore tree by mortifying his members which are upon the earth (cf. Col. 3:5), and having risen above the body of humiliation, then he shall receive the Word, and it shall be said to him, This day has salvation come to this house (cf. Lk. 19:9). Then let him lay hold on the salvation, and bring forth fruit more perfectly, scattering and pouring forth rightly that which as a publican he wrongly gathered. ~ Gregory Of Nazianzus

In the end i will forget you, I'm sorry to have to say that but, I will forget myself too ~ Steven "Jesse" Bernstein

For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norms, even our cultural ideal. ~ Carl Bernstein

Neglecting passion blocks creative flow. When you're passionate, you're energized. Likewise, when you lack passion, your energy is low and unproductive. Energy is everything when it comes to being successful. ~ Gabrielle Bernstein

When we function from a fearful, low-level energetic state, our thoughts and energy can literally pollute the world. ~ Gabrielle Bernstein

Nelson, do you remember the spring day when we climbed the barn gable so we could see the seagulls that mysteriously blew into our clay hills
swept from an ocean neither of us had ever seen though it was scarcely a hundred miles away, each bird a genuine miracle high above the green barley? The time we saw that panther in the sycamore tree and Maw said it was the sign of war? Nelson, I am sixty-three years old, the same age that both Maw and Daddy were when they died. I have written this in testimony. With this book, I presume to be done now with such remembrance. But somehow I suspect it will go on, this peering down old wells, this excavation of memory and its shades. ~ Joe Bageant

To show the potentialities of a brighter future we must first resuscitate the visions of a better past. ~ Josh Bernstein

To begin your commitment to new perceptions, start by paying attention to attack thoughts toward yourself and others. ~ Gabrielle Bernstein

Huffy Henry hid the day,
unappeasable Henry sulked.
I see his point,
a trying to put things over.
It was the thought that they thought they could do it made Henry wicked & away.
But he should have come out and talked. All the world like a woolen lover once did seem on Henry's side. Then came a departure.
Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.
I don't see how Henry, pried open for all the world to see, survived.
What he has now to say is a long wonder the world can bear & be.
Once in a sycamore I was glad all at the top, and I sang.
Hard on the land wears the strong sea and empty grows every bed. ~ John Berryman

Each day when you wake up, say: "What miracles would you have me perform today?" Then listen. ~ Gabrielle Bernstein

The American Revolution and Declaration of Independence, it has often been argued, were fueled by the most radical of all American political ideas. ~ Carl Bernstein

I think it is time we learned the lesson of our century: that the progress of the human spirit must keep pace with technological and scientific progress, or that spirit will die. It is incumbent on our educators to remember this; and music is at the top of the spiritual must list. When the study of the arts leads to the adoration of the formula (heaven forbid), we shall be lost. But as long as we insist on maintaining artistic vitality, we are able to hope in man ~ Leonard Bernstein

When we fulfill our function, which is to truly love ourselves and share love with others, then true happiness sets in. ~ Gabrielle Bernstein

No place is too far to walk if you have the time. ~ Danny Bernstein

[Eric]Goldman [a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law] says back in the 1990s, courts began to confront the question of whether software code is a form of speech. Goldman says the answer to that question came in a case called Bernstein v. U.S. Department of Justice. Student Daniel Bernstein who created an encryption software called Snuffle. He wanted to put it on the Internet. The government tried to prevent him, using a law meant to stop the export of firearms and munitions. Goldman says the student argued his code was a form of speech. ~ Laura Sydell

It has often been remarked of the Scottish character, that the stubbornness with which it is moulded shows most to advantage in adversity, when it seems akin to the native sycamore of their hills, which scorns to be biassed in its mode of growth even by the influence of the prevailing wind, but, shooting its branches with equal boldness in every direction, shows no weather-side to the storm, and may be broken, but can never be bended. ~ Walter Scott