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"We do not become CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. It's hard for us to believe we have any significance as individuals. After all, when we get sick, the show goes on and the audience doesn't even notice. Yet collectively, we are indispensable and sometimes magnificent." (18)

"You breathe in--fast, deep full--and then spin the breath out, carefully releasing it at just the right rate, like fishing line." (31)

"Choral singers are followers, in the best sense of the word. Not mindless automatons, but people who listen, digest, and process a wealth of information, then execute the directions as understood." (68)

"What does it matter? How could it possibly matter, whether we sing a chord in tune? I say it does. I say that each passionate, precise note is an act of defiance and a prayer. Human creatures can create, destroy, or sink into numbness. These seem to me the choices." (178)

— How Can We Keep From Singing by Joan Oliver Goldsmith (Page 18 - 178)

"no one is obliged to learn something from loss." (5) "This is a horrible thing we do to the newly stricken, encouraging them to remember the good times while they're still in the fetal position. Like feeding steak to a baby." (6) "the most practical thing I have learned is the power of the present tense. The past is quicksand and the future is unknowable, but in the present, you get to float." (6)

"I am holding these losses as an aunt might, as if they are familiar but not quite mine. As if they are books I will be allowed to return to some centralized sadness library." (7)

— Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley (Page 5 - 7)

"Grief is for people, not things. Everyone on the planet seems to share this understanding. Almost everyone. People like Russell, and people like me now, we don't know where sadness belongs. We tend to scrape up all the lonely, echoing, unknowable parts of ourselves and drop them in drawers or hang them from little wooden shelves, injecting our feelings into objects that won't judge or abandon us, holding on to the past in this tangible way. But everyone else? Everyone else has their priorities straight." (34)

— Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley (Page 34)

I don’t know anyone who has come out of the North American physical education system unscathed. For most of us, gym was a place where teachers who may or may not have had a background in athletics, fitness, kinesiology, or health—or any interest in them—introduced us to a few sports-related skills and then threw us into endless competition. It sapped the life out of whatever enjoyment we were getting from moving our bodies as kids and injected a ton of steroids right into the ass of our teenage insecurities. Few if any of the hours we spent flinging balls at or around each other were dedicated to learning how our bodies worked and why, let alone how we might do things with our bodies that actually made us feel good.

Kids who excelled at gym learned that physical skills and fitness were inherent qualities that required no further understanding, maintenance, or care. Their self-esteem suffered as they grew older and started to experience physical challenges beyond their understanding and specific skill set. Those of us who sucked at PE fared even worse. We learned that physical skills and fitness were inherent qualities we were never going to have, and any attempt to attain them would result in deserved humiliation and scrutiny...

For some people, such early experiences are enough to permanently destroy any interest they might have had in moving their bodies. Quite understandably, they tap out as soon as they complete their mandatory phys ed classes. Those who keep going or work up the nerve to try again have to deal with fitness culture in general, and the fitness industry in particular, which salts all of the wounds from our formative years. Or more accurately, it rips them open, pours an entire jar inside, and then shames us for our sodium consumption.

— Work It Out by Sarah Kurchak