I have desided to write some of my favorite quotes from all the books I read for this year. Here is the first one for the year...I just finished A Life on One's Own by Ilana Simons. It is about living your life through the life and works of Vigrian Woolf. Here are a view of my favorite quotes from the book. "It's relieving to talk openly without fear of waht you still have to learn." (Simons 11) "You get human by admitting you're more than one self: You can feel precious inside but you're not only the private self when you speak." (Simons 12) "Your ideas don't need to be perfectly formed before you speak them." (Simons 13) "Namely, you're alone. You reach out to people with a hope for solid connections, and sometimes get them. But as frequently, you misread and misjudge the people you know." (Simons 15) "Sometimes, just the memory of what we share makes something sweet." (Simons 18) "Communication sets the frame for what feels right" (Simons 18) "Being independent means dealing with those competing ideas, making contact with these people who matter to you, but then stomaching the ambivalence in carving out your own choice- which is likely to be an opnion that no other head in the world completely hears or agrees with." (Simons 20) "Our communication links us, and if someone could rise above Earth, she would hear this ongoing coversation, which rises from our books, our advertising compamies, and our computers and movies. But while connection rises, we also sort through it in heads that are distinct from one another." (Simons 21) "I remember what friends have said, and enjoy the miraculous momory of their concern, but then move around my room by myself." (Simons 22) "Seeing differences in perspectives is a letting go filled with anxiety and joy." (Simons 26) "One reason you don't fully know people is that they're always changing." (Simons 27) " The places you've been and the moments you've enjoyed define the boundaries in how you know a friend. You pull up memories; you collect them together; and you only get that side your friends that the friend assumed with you. In turn, Woolf says we only find calm in imtimacy when we know that people don't boil down to something fixed and specific." (Simons 30-31) "That you'll sometimes live with a different memory or idea than your friend does, and that living well with each other means weathering you differences as well as the way you mirror each other." (Simons 31) "You're not obliged to say everything to the peron next to you, because sometimes thoughts need space to process." (Simons 46) "One of the most difficult tasks in being (always admittedly egotistical) humans is staying calm while difference happens- keeping a lid on our need to stake and prove. Silence is sometimes a fabulous strategy- as ay to expand the head, and to be fair to people around you." (Simons 49) "Relationships that push your buttons, she knew, can teach you something." (Simons 52) "Maturity is not the ability to keep calm. It's the willingness to face your reactivity." (Simons 56) "A soulmate is the person who's gotten the chance to see something realy about you. You risked; your bared ugliness; you forged a bond. This friendship becomes something mor lasting than a superficial thing. Soulmate means a friend who understands something about you and so lives flexibly in this relationship, in which you can both risk a little, and insult a little, and dare a little, and stray a little, while something solid connects you at the center." (Simons 61) "The idea is that positive feedback doesn't only feel good, but actually changes your creative observation." (Simons 71) "People change but work is constant. A happy person is a person who has steady creative work." (Simons 77) | 
