"Soon silence will have passed into legend.  Man has turned his back on silence.  Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation...tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego.  His anxiety subsides.  His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation."  --Jean Arp

"Technology... is a queer thing.  It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other."  --C.P. Snow, New York Times

"Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain."  --J.K. Rowling

"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity."  --Albert Einstein

It is summertime. This means the leisure of days in the sun, little or few alarm clocks, mornings met with the joy of unfilled days. For me, it also means a time to separate myself from my technology. Generally, as the school year progresses, I use, and become dependent upon, technology more and more until, inevitably, I am completely addicted. And so, I use this break from 'normal life' to detox my system from the dependence upon constant noise and input into my brain. This 'unplugging' is indefinite, and will probably not last as long as I'd hope, but this means that Quote of the Day is also indefinitely postponed. (I'd update from my phone if I could get it to work, but alas, it comes out screwy when I do that.) So thank you to my faithful followers who will miss this--I will spend the summer collecting up a new batch of fresh and fun quotes. :] Have a happy summer.

  

"How neat is that? That's pretty neat!" 

--from the 'Neature Walk' youtube videos

"The sprinkles [in ice cream], as the malt shop owner insightfully pointed out, are mainly there for the happiness factor. You really can't taste them, but they brighten up the whole ice-cream experience and make you smile." --Leslie Ludy (in her book The Lost Art of True Beauty)

"Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all." --Harriet Van Horne

I'm home for the summer, which means the freedom to cook. Tonight I'm making dinner, for the fifth day in a row. I'm in heaven.

"I can't deliver a baby! I'm not properly prepared--I need to take a class, or read a book, or shadow a nurse, or at least have my mom hug me first! Oh God…" --Annie, Community

"Get the cat out of the piano!" --Dad

 

20th century music can be...challenging to listen to. I'm doing a collection of Bartok dances for my audition/senior recital next year, and as I was playing it yesterday, my dad decided that this was what my high art sounded like. 

"Mother love is the fuel that enables a normal human being to do the impossible."  --Marion C. Garretty, quoted in A Little Spoonful of Chicken Soup for the Mother's Soul

This is a very, very true story. I personally am not a mother, but I happen to have one of the best moms on the planet--one who listens and encourages and is my biggest fan, cheering me on when I think I can't go on. So Happy Mother's Day, Mom--I just hope someday I can be even a fraction of the mom you've been to me to my kids.

"I don't care how poor a man is; if he has family, he's rich."  --M*A*S*H

"I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment." --C.S. Lewis

"Nope, he's from Michigan...most definitely United States-ian........uhm, meaning American." --Me

It's exam week. Today is my hardest and fullest day of exams, and by no choice of my own I only got 2 hours of sleep last night. Need I say more?

"Ah--memory impairment. The free prize at the bottom of every vodka bottle." --Sheldon Cooper, The Big Bang Theory

I've been battling a very stubborn upper respiratory infection for the past few weeks, and this has provided me with a nice little addiction to NyQuil. Actually, I'm stuck on Atvian, which is the sleep medicine they put IN NyQuil. I still have a terrible cough, which is how I justify my use of it, but I really don't need it. However, I figure that finals time isn't the best opportunity for me to try and break an addiction, so I'm not worrying about it until Thursday when my summer officially starts. However, I personally believe that Atvian is nothing more than really strong alcohol, because I sleep like a baby, but in the morning I feel rather hung over for a good portion of the morning. In the most recent episode of Big Bang, Sheldon makes this comment, and I feel as though this applies to me very strongly this morning. =]

"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