Quotes Included in Room for J

No more fiendish punishment could be devised, even were such a thing physically possible, than that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all the members thereof.
—William James

Thursday's child has far to go.
—Anonymous

There is no love in ignorance. What I write comes from me, God, and is, therefore, the Truth.
—Joel Steven Hanson

Dear, dear! How queer everything is today!
And yesterday things went on just as usual.
I wonder if I've been changed in the night?
Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning?
I almost think I remember feeling a little different.
But if I'm not the same, the next question is, who in the world am I?
Ah, that's the great puzzle!
—from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given you
because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.
—from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

There is only one question that really matters: why do bad things happen to good people?
—Rabbi Harold Kushner

I have lived on the lip
of insanity, wanting to know reasons,
knocking on a door. It opens.
I've been knocking from the inside!
—Rumi

And yet, I'm doing it out of love, (I'm doing) things that are going to make her better. Getting her help, you know, 'cause that's the only way she's going to get better. At least that what I tell myself.
—A retired secretary and mother, from The Burden of Sympathy by David Karp

As little as we know of illness, we know even less of care. As much as the ill person's experience is denied, the caretaker's experience is denied even more completely.
—Arthur Frank, At the Will of the Body

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

We are still mad about the mad. We still don't understand them and that lack of understanding makes us mean and arrogant, and makes us mislead ourselves, and so we hurt them.
—David Cohen

I, a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made.
—A. E. Housman

And she gave birth to her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.
—Luke, Chapter 2, Verse 7

Well, now that we have seen each other… if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you. Is that a bargain?
—Alice in Wonderland, to the Unicorn

We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves… The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.
—N. Scott Momaday