"I just want one of those wand thingys so I can be like Harry Potter." 
--Will

Being a music major, we have to take a class called Basic Conducting, and we get to use batons. Within a conversation about said class and batons (and, to his credit, it was well after midnight), Will said this. Awesome. Love my friends. We're such music nerds.

"Dance like the photo's not tagged, love like you've never been unfriended, tweet like nobody's following." --lifeisgood, via twitter

A few months ago, I caved and got a twitter account. For the most part, it is widespread enabled stalking, though I try to use mine mostly for immediate quote updates. (big surprise, right?) But I'm following something called 'life is good', and though this quote reflects the massively technological centrality of today's society, this is a good quote. It's a paraphrase of a quote that was popular five or ten years ago (it's shocking that we need "modern-day" translations for things said five years ago, isn't it?), but for most of us, this new 'translation' resonates.

"Humor is the easiest to achieve; the 'heart' is always the toughest, because you can't tell people to feel a certain way." --John Lasseter, Pixar

"Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy. Music is the electrical soil in which the spirit lives, thinks, and invents." 
--Ludwig van Beethoven

"If you want to improve your understanding, drink coffee; it is the intelligent beverage." --Sydney Smith

"Has anyone ever noticed that 'studying' is just 'student' and 'dying' put together?"

It's that time again. The time when everyone walks very quickly around campus--as quickly as they can as they try to balance a vat of coffee atop a towering stack of encyclopedia-size books--while avoiding eye contact with anyone and muttering equations and facts and dates under their breath. That's right--it's finals time. Ten more days and I'll be home free, but in those ten days I have about three months worth of work to do. So here's to the next week and a half--I hope I make it.

"It takes two to go to war but only one to fall in love." --Fiction Family

"She started with anger and ended with ambiguous kindness. You should be thankful."--Matthew Westerholm

Yesterday was just "one of THOSE days"--when I was 'pretend mad' at a lot of people, and it was mostly pretend, but it was a little bit for real. I tried to threaten one of my best friends when he was being obnoxious, but between it being impossible for me to actually be mean, and the fact that I was exhausted, the threat petered out into nothingness before the end of the sentence. That was when Matthew addressed my friend, very seriously, and said this.

"i thank You God for this most amazing

day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth

day of life and love and wings: and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any-lifted from the no

of all nothing-human merely being 

doubt umimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)"

--e.e. cummings

"To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time." --Leonard Bernstein

"The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small manageable taks, and then starting on the first one." --Mark Twain

"Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today." --Malcolm X

"For the Lord your God is living among you,

He is a mighty Savior.

He will delight in you with gladness.

With His love, He will calm all your fears.

He will rejoice over you with joyful songs."

--Zephaniah 3:17

"Never trust a man who hasn't brought a book." -Lemony Snicket

 I always appreciate the Lemony Snicket quotes I steal from Leah...usually they are about books, and it makes me happy that someone else holds books in the same high esteem I do.

"marty.lamain: I was reading away, just amazed, and then the sand fairy came
marty.lamain: I told her it wasn't open hours, but she stayed anyways
marty.lamain: and made me fall asleep." --Marty, via Skype

"Technology is wonderful...when it works." --Mom

This is a very, very true statement. I was reminded of this when I had to take my computer into tech support AGAIN last night to have it wiped and re-imaged. That is the third time this school year that my computer has ceased working correctly and I've had to do this. Sometimes I wonder if all this technology is really worth the trouble. And then it scares me a little when I'm without my computer for a night and feel naked and exposed--my dependence on technology is a bit unnerving. Our dependence as a culture is heightening more and more...hopefully it won't increase too much more, otherwise we'll become like the people in the Disney-Pixar movie Wall-E. We'll see. =]

"The name of the talk she was giving at the conference was 'Music and Sexuality'. I'd go to that--if only because 'sexuality' is in the title." --PVD

"The Christian lives by grace as Abba's child, utterly rejecting the God who catches people by surprise in  a sign of weakness--the God incapable of smiling at our awkward mistakes, the God who does not accept a seat at our human festivities, the God who says 'You will pay for that', the God incapable of understanding that children will always get dirty and be forgetful." --Brennan Manning, Abba's Child

"Being vague is almost as much fun as that other thing." --Matthew Westerholm

"Friendship isn't a big thing - it's a million little things."  --Author Unknown

"We can often endure an extra pound of pain far more easily than we can suffer the withdrawal of an ounce of accustomed pleasure."  --Sydney J. Harris

"It's neither of them...let's kill Stephanie." --Lauren, while playing 'Mafia'

"A guy calls the musicians' guild to get a quote on a 6 piece band for a wedding. The rep says 'Off the top of my head, about $2000.' He says 'WHAT? FOR MUSIC?' The rep responds 'I'll tell you what. Call the plumbers' union & ask for six plumbers to work from 6 to midnight on a Saturday night. Whatever they charge you, we'll work for half.'"

It's so true. Musicians seem to be constantly short-changed...pun intended. And yet, I wouldn't have another profession for all the money that's found in other professions.

"You don't really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around - and why his parents will always wave back."  --William D. Tammeus

"Why did Professor Snape stand in the middle of the road? So no one could tell what side he was on."

"The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellarful of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two hundred proof grace--of bottle after bottle of pure distillate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the Gospel--after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps--suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started...Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, nor the flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case."--Robert Capon

"Love is like playing the piano. First you must learn to play by the rules, then you must forget the rules and play from your heart."