Bridget > Bridget's Quotes

“The divorce of art from technology is completely unnatural. It's just that it's gone on so long you have to be an archeologist to find out where the two separated.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“Discontent is the first necessity of progress. —THOMAS A. EDISON”
― Chris Guillebeau, The Happiness of Pursuit: Find the Quest that will Bring Purpose to Your Life

“For whatever we lose (like a you or a me),
It's always our self we find in the sea.”
― e.e. cummings, 100 Selected Poems

“You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.”
― Chris Guillebeau, The Happiness of Pursuit: Finding the Quest That Will Bring Purpose to Your Life

“I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.”
― Anais Nin

“Managers could be tidy-minded simply because tidiness seemed like the right and proper way to be.”
― Tim Harford, Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives

“SEE YOUR FUTURE I want you to imagine yourself a year from now. You know that in a year you are going to be different, whether you do nothing or something. And the choices you make between now and then will determine that difference. But for today, I want you to imagine owning all those other days. Visualize that you wake up with purpose and clarity. You push yourself against resistance. You take control of your diet and supplementation. You turn dead time into alive time. You work effectively and aren’t afraid to power down the engines to rest. You train your body into a durable, capable machine. You connect with yourself, your friends, and the universe. You turn sex into an adventure of pleasure. You go to sleep with a mission, and actually … sleep. Imagine what a year of living like that has done for you. Walk in the shoes of that new person. See yourself through that person’s eyes. Look in the mirror at that body. Maybe the circles under your eyes are gone, and that stubborn weight has lifted—mentally and physically. See what has happened in your career, and in your family. That person is you, on the other side of Resistance. If you see it clearly enough, it will be done.”
― Aubrey Marcus, Own the Day, Own Your Life: Optimised practices for waking, working, learning, eating, training, playing, sleeping and sex

“I’m going to say this once here, and then—because it is obvious—I will not repeat it in the course of this book: not all boys engage in such behavior, not by a long shot, and many young men are girls’ staunchest allies. However, every girl I spoke with, every single girl—regardless of her class, ethnicity, or sexual orientation; regardless of what she wore, regardless of her appearance—had been harassed in middle school, high school, college, or, often, all three. Who, then, is truly at risk of being “distracted” at school?”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“NOT EVERYONE NEEDS TO BELIEVE IN YOUR DREAM, BUT YOU DO.”
― Chris Guillebeau, The Happiness of Pursuit: Finding the Quest That Will Bring Purpose to Your Life

“When we've defined femininity for their generation so narrowly, in such a sexualized, commercialized, heteroeroticized way, where is the space, the vision, the celebration of other ways to be a girl?”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“Do one thing every day that scares you. —ELEANOR ROOSEVELT”
― Chris Guillebeau, The Happiness of Pursuit: Finding the Quest That Will Bring Purpose to Your Life

“Don't try to explain everything, but do tell a few good stories.”
― Chris Guillebeau, The Happiness of Pursuit: Finding the Quest That Will Bring Purpose to Your Life

“What is the truth and how do you know it when you have it?... How do we really know anything? Is there an "I" a "soul," which knows, or is this soul merely cells coordinating senses?... Is reality basically changing, or is it fixed and permanent?... When it's said that something means something, what's meant by that?”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure.”
― Chris Guillebeau, The Happiness of Pursuit: Finding the Quest That Will Bring Purpose to Your Life

“The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.” So, too, for a quest. The most important thing is continuing to make progress.”
― Chris Guillebeau, The Happiness of Pursuit: Finding the Quest That Will Bring Purpose to Your Life

“Jump in with both feet. Stop making excuses.”
― Chris Guillebeau, The Happiness of Pursuit: Finding the Quest That Will Bring Purpose to Your Life

“It's not where you begin, it's where you end.”
― Aubrey Marcus

“you are not rewarded for the comfortable choice.”
― Aubrey Marcus, Own the Day, Own Your Life: Optimized Practices for Waking, Working, Learning, Eating, Training, Playing, Sleeping, and Sex

“I also worry about the incessant drumbeat of self-objectification: the pressure on young women to reduce their worth to their bodies and to see those bodies as a collection of parts that exist for others' pleasure; to continuously monitor their appearance; to perform rather than to feel sensuality.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“Some girls bragged to me that they could "have sex like a guy," by which they meant they could engage without emotion, they could objectify their partners as fully and reductively as boys often objectified them. That seemed a sad, low road to equality. What if, instead, they expected boys to be as sexually giving as girls? What if they were taught that all sexual partners, whether total strangers or intimates, deserved esteem and generosity, just as people do in any human interaction? What if they refused to settle for anything less?”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“Leaving something unnamed makes it quite literally unspeakable: a void, an absence, a taboo.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“As long as adults still avoid open discussion on sexuality, teens will inevitably seek information on today's electronic street corner.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“Girls did not always organize their thinking about themselves around the physical. Before World War I, self-improvement meant being less self-involved, less vain: helping others, focusing on schoolwork, becoming better read, and cultivating empathy. Author Joan Jacobs Brumberg highlighted this change in her book The Body Project by comparing the New Year’s resolutions of girls at the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: “Resolved,” wrote a girl in 1892, “to think before speaking. To work seriously. To be self-restrained in conversations and actions. Not to let my thoughts wander. To be dignified. Interest myself more in others.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“Activists are correct in saying that the only thing that 100 percent of rapes have in common is a rapist. You can shroud women from head to toe, forbid them alcohol, imprison them in their homes—and there will still be rape.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“Simpson Rowe was quick to say that only perpetrators are responsible for assault, but assertiveness and self-advocacy are crucial defensive skills.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“Can there be true equality in the classroom and the boardroom if there isn’t in the bedroom? Back in 1995 the National Commission on Adolescent Sexual Health declared healthy sexual development a basic human right. Teen intimacy, it said, ought to be “consensual, non-exploitative, honest, pleasurable, and protected against unintended pregnancy and STDs.” How is it, over two decades later, that we are so shamefully short of that goal?

Sara McClelland, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, writes about sexuality as a matter of “intimate justice,” touching on fundamental issues of gender inequality, economic disparity, violence, bodily integrity, physical and mental health, self-efficacy, and power dynamics in our most personal relationships. She asks us to consider: Who has the right to engage in sexual behavior? Who has the right to enjoy it? Who is the primary beneficiary of the experience? Who feels deserving? How does each partner define “good enough?” Those are thorny questions when looking at female sexuality at any age, but particularly when considering girls’ early, formative experience. Nonetheless, I was determined to ask them.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“Right-wing influence on sex education has played an equal, if not greater role. Federally mandated abstinence-only programs, which began in the early 1980s, not only reinforced that intercourse was the line in the sand of chastity, but also, using the threat of AIDS as justification, hammered home the idea that it might well kill you. Oral sex, then, was the obvious work-around. I doubt, though, that social conservatives would consider it a victory that, across a range of studies, college students who identify as religious are even more likely than others to say oral sex is not “sex,” or that over a third of teenagers included it in their definition of “abstinence” (nearly a quarter included anal sex), or that roughly 70 percent agreed that someone who engages in oral sex is still a virgin.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape

“Fully half the girls had experienced something along a spectrum of coercion to rape. Those stories were agonizing; equally upsetting, only two had previously told another adult what had happened.”
― Peggy Orenstein, Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape