Bones
Stray Lines. Found Wisdom.
Last Update: 05-14-2026, 7:37 a.m., CDT
Forbearance
“As we walked through a museum dedicated to his faith in a perpetual, however jagged, path forward, I was reminded of something Michelle [Obama] said of her husband when she addressed the 2012 Democratic National Convention: ‘He reminds me that we are playing a long game here, and that change is hard change is slow.’”
—Peter Slevin, “Out of Office,” The New Yorker (May 11 & 18, 2026)
Steadfastness
“When it appears that people other than yourself in your world do not act toward you as you would like, it is not due to reluctance on their part but a lack of persistence in your assumption of your life already being as you want it to be. Your assumption to be effective cannot be a single isolated act; it must be a maintained attitude of the wish fulfilled.”
—Neville Goddard, The Power of Awareness (Tarcher Cornerstone Editions, 23rd printing, 2012)
Love
“To care about the world you must love at least a piece of it. One person, perhaps even a landscape, might be enough.”
—Susan Neiman, Left is Not Woke (2023)
Ardor
“It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
Forward
—Cartoon, The New Yorker (June 9, 2025)
Allegiance
Joseph Campbell: In matters of this kind, yes. The majority’s function in relation to the spirit is to try to listen and to open up to someone who’s had an experience beyond that of food, shelter, progeny, and wealth.
Have you ever read Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt?
Bill Moyers: Not in a long time.
Campbell: Remember the last line? “I have never done the thing I wanted to do in all my life.” That is a man who never followed his bliss. Well, I actually heard that line when I was teaching at Sarah Lawrence. Before I was married, I used to eat out in the restaurants of town for my lunch and dinners. Thursday night was the maid’s night off in Bronxville, so that many of the families were out in restaurants. One fine evening I was in my favorite restaurant there, and at the next table there was a father, a mother, and a scrawny boy about 12 years old. The father said to the boy, “Drink your tomato juice.”
And the boy said, “I don’t want to.”
Then the father, with a louder voice, said, “Drink your tomato juice.”
And the mother said, “Don’t make him do what he doesn’t want to do.”
The father looked at her and said, “He can’t go through life doing what he wants to do. If he does only what he wants to do, he’ll be dead. Look at me. I’ve never done a thing I wanted to do in all my life.”
And I thought, “My God, there’s Babbitt incarnate!”
That’s the man who never followed his bliss. You may have a success in life, but then just think of it — what kind of life was it? What good was it — you’ve never done the thing you wanted to do in all your life. I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want to go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don’t let anyone throw you off.
—The Power of Myth, pp. 146-147 (1991)
Risk
“... it’s another thing you think you can’t do. And maybe you can, maybe you can’t. That’s irrelevant. That’s irrelevant. You can or you can’t. What’s relevant is that you dive in. That’s relevant. Because however it comes out, it is worth it. Failure is just as worth it as success.”
Why?
“Because everything contains a reward of some kind. It’s your job to find it.”
—Jerry Seinfeld, “The Blocks with Neal Brennan” (May 2, 2024)
Amplification
“I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, and at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge.”
—John Keats, excerpt from “No. 45” (December 1817), The Letters of John Keats: 1814-1821 (Vol. I) edited by Hyder Edward Rollins
Courage
“The need to police group members’ beliefs so as to ferret out deviants, along with the fact that the expression of heretical opinion may be the best available evidence of deviance, creates the possibility for what I call self-censorship: members whose beliefs are sound but who nevertheless differ from some aspect of communal wisdom are compelled by a fear of ostracism to avoid the candid expression of their opinions.”
—Glenn Loury, “Self-Censorship in Public Discourse: A Theory of ‘Political Correctness’ and Related Phenomena,” Rationality and Society, Vol. 6, No. 4, p. 430 (October 1994)
Transfiguration
It careened and crashed while the others waved
And you waited in the sun so long when you only wanted shade
Let the old men laugh, let the old men say
That I’ve never done nothing that wasn’t out of love, baby
Now the weight that you carry seems such a heavy load
While you’re face down in the moment waiting to let go
Remember standing in the light
Remember crawling all the way
You paraded in the nighttime
For a clеan getaway
You were standing in thе water
But only up to your knees
But you know a strong current can always
Sweep you off your feet
You were waiting for the right time, but it could take so long
While you’re face down in the moment waiting to let go
Face down in the moment waiting to let go
You were following the blind
When they stole your name
You were planning a way out
When you lost your way
Bent to a hunch now
Like a broke-down show
Face down in the moment
Just waiting to let go
Face down in the moment waiting to let go
Face down in the moment waiting to let go
Keep waiting
Keep waiting
Keep waiting
You keep waiting on the night
You keep waiting on your pain
And every moment that you wait now
Is a moment slipped away
I think you’re gonna have to come out and face
All the fear you can’t explain
And all your life, you’ve been face down
Now it’s time for you to see
All your life, you’ve been face down
Now it’s time for you to see
All your life, you’ve been face down
Now it’s time for you to see
See it!
See it!
See it!
—Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats, “Face Down in the Moment,” The Future (2021)
Patience
“‘Never make a decision just to get something done,’ he says.”
—John McPhee, quoting Frank L. Boyden, “The Headmaster,” as reprinted in The John McPhee Reader (1992)
Availability
“I guess the main thing is having a true project with depth. Whatever the form, doesn’t really matter, as long as the depth is there.”
—Victor Wembanyama, as quoted by Jared Weiss, “Victor Wembanyama Wanted to Create a Spurs Fan Group: The Jackals Became So Much More,” The Athletic (January 15, 2026)
Civil Courage
“Hostility to such politics has been voluble and loud. Left-wing critics of tactical triangulation have maintained that this can be seen only as collaboration with evil. Right-wing impatience with the politics of compromise appears in the disquieting revival of Catholic ‘integralism,’ whose proponents favor capturing the state in order to impose a singular, and religiously inspired, vision of the common good. What unites these movements is a shared contempt for the moderate, who is dismissed as cowardly, unprincipled, or insincere: wimps who inexplicably hate winning.
“[Krista] Lawlor’s account helps explain why this contempt is so corrosive. When one side decides that the treaty was a mistake — that only total victory will do — it stops sending the costly signals that sustain shared ‘discursive’ space. ‘Better wrong with Sartre than right with Aron,’ the slogan used to go in the glory days of the French postwar left. Who wouldn’t prefer the glamour and the redemptive grandeur of the radical Jean-Paul Sartre to the pallid temporizing of the liberal Raymond Aron? But people like Aron have offered something other than the glory of commitment: a sense of imagination, of compassion, an awareness that your foes, too, have ideals that feel glamorous to them.
“In defending reasonableness, Lawlor is defending the exhausted majority — those who still want to live together on terms of mutual recognition. She is unlikely to persuade the most passionate of partisans. But she may perhaps give heart to the despised moderates, who may be starting to internalize their critics’ charges that their willingness to compromise is really just a failure of nerve.
“Think back to another culture-war moment. In the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, the rapper and activist Sister Souljah asked, rhetorically, ‘If Black people kill Black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?’ To a question about whether there were any good white people, she replied, ‘If there are, I haven’t met them.’ Bill Clinton, then running for President, reproached her when he spoke at Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. Many on the left saw betrayal and calculation. Why not see it, instead, as a performance of reasonableness, a refusal to allow a minority position within one’s alliance to define the map of value for everyone else?”
—Nikhil Krishnan, “Start Making Sense: Being Reasonable as a Social Value,” The New Yorker (April 27, 2026)
Desire
“I went out very nice dinner last night and I enjoyed the dinner. I got the check at the end of the meal and I started thinking about the check-at-the-end-of-the-meal system. It’s not a real good system, I think. Money … if you think about it … is a very different thing before and after you eat. Before you eat, money has absolutely no value. You know? You sit down at the table and you’re like the ruler of an empire. More drinks! More appetizers! We must have everything immediately! This is the greatest meal of our lives! And after you eat — first of all, when you’re really full, you can’t remember ever being hungry ever in your life. You got the pants open, napkins destroyed, cigarette butt in the mashed potatoes — you know it’s not really festive — and you get the check and you’re like, ‘What is this? I don’t understand.’ People are always mystified by the check — aren’t they? They start passing it around the table. ‘Does this look right to you?’ We’re not hungry now; why are we buying all this food?”
—Jerry Seinfeld, Late Show with David Letterman (1989)
Calibration
“One thing you do learn with flying is, when you’re off course a little bit, my instructor always said, ‘small adjustments normalize the situation.’ In basketball, life, and basketball coaching, small adjustments and normalizing the situation as much as possible have a lot to do with problem-solving.”
—Rick Carlisle, as quoted by David Aldridge, “Pacers Coach Rick Carlisle Keeps Looking to Improve Himself in ‘Ultimate Crucible,’” The Athletic (June 4, 2025)
Cunning
“On February 14, 1986, during a game against the Trail Blazers, in an effort to both work on craft and fight tedium, [Larry] Bird played forty-eight minutes and scored 47 points using only his left hand. Explaining himself to the press, he said, ‘I’m saving my right hand for the Lakers.’”
—Rich Cohen, When the Game Was War: The NBA’s Greatest Season, p. 71 (2024, paperback edition)
Growth
“Why should you want to exclude from your life all unsettling, all pain, all depression of spirit, when you don’t know what work it is these states are performing within you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where it all comes from and where it is leading? You well know you are in a period of transition and want nothing more than to be transformed.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (Charlie Louth translation, 2011)
Wholeness
“All of us have what was given to us by nature, how we’ve been created or built. This is how I’ve been created and built. I was born, and since the day I was born, it was in my body that I was going to have a thrombosis someday. It’s also written that I’m having this height and I’m having this talent for basketball. Just like everybody in (our locker room). We were all born with a roll of the dice, and we just have to make the most out of it.”
—Victor Wembanyama, as quoted by Jared Weiss, “Victor Wembanyama Wanted to Create a Spurs Fan Group: The Jackals Became So Much More,” The Athletic (January 15, 2026)
Forward
“One of [Hal Mumme’s] favorite sayings was, Play the next play. The words were a combination pep talk and theory of life, perfectly aligned with his coaching philosophy. The gist was, life, like football, is a headlong dive into the future. There is no past, at least not one you should worry too much about. If you lose, let it go. Don’t panic. If you win, don’t be too satisfied. Play the next play. The future awaits. There are so many possibilities. And the moment was always better if the next play was an onside kick or a fake punt in one’s own end zone or a certifiable crazy attempt to throw a touchdown pass from one’s own 1-yard line. Because the Air Raid was such a malleable concept, there were any number of futures out there. Anything could happen, and if anything could happen, then there was no point in dwelling on the past. Play the next play.”
—S.C. Gwynne, The Perfect Pass: American Genius and the Reinvention of Football (2016)
Trust
“To some, ‘nirvana’ suggests bliss. More literally, it refers to the extinguishing of the mental fires that cause suffering. Today’s happiness comes from loosening your grip on an unhappy idea.”
—Holiday Mathis, Horoscope, Minnesota Star Tribune (February 4, 2026)
Simplicity
“The life they had together was one that neither of them had really imagined. They grew from passion to lust to a deep sensuality that renewed itself from moment to moment.
“‘Lust and learning,’ Katherine once said. ‘That’s really all there is, isn’t it?’
“And it seemed to Stoner that that was exactly true, that that was one of the things he had learned.”
—John Williams, Stoner (New York Review of Books Classics, 2006)
Sovereignty
“The energy of the central point is manifested in the almost irresistible compulsion and urge to become what one is, just as every organism is driven to assume the form that is characteristic of its nature, no matter what the circumstances. This centre is not felt or thought of as the ego but, if one may so express it, as the self. Although the centre is represented by an innermost point, it is surrounded by a periphery containing everything that belongs to the self — the paired opposites that make up the total personality.”
—Carl Jung, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, as quoted in Individuation for Adult Replacement Children: Ways of Coming Into Being by Kristina E. Schellinski (2020)
Indomitable
“Don’t downgrade your dream just to fit your reality. Upgrade your conviction to match your destiny.”
—Stuart Scott, epigraph, Boo-Yah: A Stuart Scott Portrait (2025)
Guile
He gives out a lot of “false information.”
—Dave Randorf, television broadcaster, attributing the phrase to an opposing NHL coach who was speaking about the on-ice intelligence of Tampa Bay Lightning right wing Nikita Kucherov, during a game against the Detroit Red Wings on April 13, 2026
Confidence
Norman Dale (played by Gene Hackman): First of all, let’s be real friendly here, OK? My name is Norm. Secondly, your coaching days are over.
George (played by Chelcie Ross): Look, mister, there’s two kinds of dumb, uh ... the guy that gets naked and runs out in the snow and barks at the moon, and, uh, the guy who does the same thing in my living room. First one don’t matter; the second one you’re kinda forced to deal with.
Dale: Translate. That some sort of threat?
George: I don’t know why Cletus drug your tired old bones in here. He musta owed you somethin’ fierce. Fact is, mister, you start screwin’ up this team, I’ll personally hide-strap your ass to a pine rail and send you up the Monon Line.
[George angrily turns and storms out of the gym]
Dale: Leave the ball — will ya, George?
—Hoosiers (1986)
Forward
There’s a song that sailors know
Lost, alone and far from home
(I am on my way)
Golden galleons, golden guns
To find a place under the sun
(I am on my way)
There’s a song on the Sahara wind
That lifts you to your feet again
(I am on my way)
That dances on the clockwork stars
That pulses through a beating heart
(I am on my way)
—The Midnight, “Explorers,” Kids (2018)
Aliveness
“You can only understand anything that matters — dreams, neurotic symptoms, people, literature — by over-interpreting it; by seeing it, from different aspects, as the product of multiple impulses. Over-interpretation, here, means not settling for a single interpretation, however apparently compelling. The implication — which hints at Freud’s ongoing suspicion, i.e., ambivalence, about psychoanalysis — is that the more persuasive, the more authoritative the interpretation the less credible it is, or should be. If one interpretation explained Hamlet we wouldn’t need Hamlet anymore: Hamlet as a play would have been murdered. Over-interpretation means not being stopped in your tracks by what you are most persuaded by; to believe in a single interpretation is radically to misunderstand the object one is interpreting, and interpretation itself.”
—Adam Phillips, “Against Self-Criticism,” London Review of Books, Vol. 37, No. 5 (March 5, 2015)
Self-Trust
“Twenty-thousand natural-born underdogs roared the winner’s roar. The man who made the moment possible by refusing to do anything but what he loves to do smiled, and for just a few seconds his mind was present and accounted for. Then he ran up the concrete tunnel and back into the pleasure of thinking for himself.”
—Michael Lewis, “Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep,” The New York Times Magazine (December 4, 2005)
Authority
“He felt himself at last beginning to be a teacher, which was simply a man to whom his book is true, to whom is given a dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or weakness or inadequacy as a man. It was a knowledge of which he could not speak, but one which changed him, once he had it, so that no one could mistake its presence.”
—John Williams, Stoner (New York Review of Books Classics, 2006)
Integration
“So when he got on the bus that morning, he didn’t think anything was imminent.
“Less than an hour later, Dosunmu got the word — he was on his way to Minnesota.
“‘I just felt like, if you knew the trade was going to happen, if you knew it was done the night before, or you knew it was close, it was no need to have me get on the bus if you the trade was going down,’ the 26-year-old [NBA] guard said.
“His feelings were all over the place. Born and raised in Chicago, [Ayo] Dosunmu was on this way out from his hometown team to a new situation in a contract year.
“When he got back to his Toronto hotel, he did what he always does when he gets emotional: broke out his journal and started writing. Not on a computer or his phone, but an actual composition notebook, ‘like in third grade,’ with a pen. He put the date and the time on the page, then he let is out.
“‘I wanted to make sure I embraced all my feelings. I didn’t want to bottle up anything,’ Dosunmu said shortly after the trade. ‘As the hours went on, I was able to understand it and be like: This is a great opportunity for me. Excited to be here with the Timberwolves.’”
—Chris Hine, “Wolves’ Dosunmu Pens New Chapter,” StarTribune (April 8, 2026)
Work
“He never knows exactly what the other players might be saying about him, but he knows what they say about Fitz: ‘They think his intensity is ridiculous.’ And maybe they do. Of course, one fringe benefit of laughing at intensity is that it enables you to ignore the claims that a new kind of seriousness makes upon you.”
—Michael Lewis, “Coach Fitz’s Management Theory,” The New York Times Magazine (March 28, 2004)
Wisdom
“Men of few words are the best men.”
—Shakespeare, Henry V (Act 3, Scene 2), as delivered by “Boy” during a production at the Guthrie Theater, May 12, 2024
Self-Trust
“In Spanish there is a word for which I can’t find a counter-word in English. It is the verb vacilar, present participle vacilando. It does not mean vacillating at all. If one is vacilando, he is going somewhere but doesn’t greatly care whether or not he gets there, although he has direction.”
—John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America (Penguin Classics edition, 1997)
Courage
“Freud’s biggest contribution to psychoanalytic thought might be his portrait of a persecutory, enigmatic, and disturbing unconscious. For Rorty, the Freudian id is another God term, a bad-faith bid to ‘delegate and outsource our purposes and out imagination and our intelligence to something beyond ourselves,’ as [Adam] Phillips puts it. Rorty, he writes, prefers to envision the unconscious as a team of partners or interlocutors, all of them ‘really useful, helpful, and informed.’ The prospect delights Phillips, but he’s skeptical: Does pragmatism’s redescription merely baffle our efforts to understand and transform our darker impulses? It’s when we refuse to face what we really want, he worries, that we grow pliant and manipulable, vulnerable to the lure of instant gratification and denied the chance to make something tonic out of our frustration.”
—Katy Waldman, “Listen to Yourselves,” The New Yorker (March 23, 2026)
Fulfillment
“… the mission of life is to live that potentiality. How do you do it? My answer is, ‘Follow your bliss.’ There’s something inside you that knows when you’re in the center, that knows when you’re on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you’ve lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don’t get any money, you still have your bliss.”
—Joseph Campbell (with Bill Moyers), The Power of Myth, p. 285 (1991)
Self-Worth
“Think, dear sir, of the world inside you — be it remembrance of your childhood or longing for your future. Only be attentive to what is arising in you and value it above all that you notice around you. Your innermost experience is worthy of all your love; you must focus your work on that and not waste too much time or courage explaining your position to anyone else. Why do you need to?”
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy translation, 2021)
Boldness
“Yes, my advice to you is to take risks in your life — that’s the best thing I can tell you. And I don’t mean something like walking across a highway blindfolded.
“When I was in junior high I had a part-time summer job at the Walter Mackenzie Planetarium in Nova Scotia.
“I would change lightbulbs that were the stars. That’s how I first got interested in astronomy.
“I worked my way up to that job and first had to change the bulbs in the lobby.
“In fact, now whenever I’m in a lobby and look up at the lights in the ceiling I can make out a simple solar system.
“My father wanted me to be an electrician but from working at the planetarium I got it in my head that I would love to be an astronomer even though I thought it would never really happen.
“Like a kid wanting to be a baseball player or an astronaut. Although I couldn’t really want to be an astronaut because when I was a kid there were no astronauts.
“But at least I wanted to try. Because I thought what if I end up being 50 years old selling insurance in Wyoming and always wondering what would have happened if I had tried it.
“Not that there’s anything wrong with selling insurance in Wyoming.
“So I took the risk to pursue being an astronomer and I’ve had this whole life and career because of it.
“That little tiny fork in the road changed everything.”
—A fictional Carl Sagan, speaking to the 7-year-old title character of Harold, p. 228 (2023) by Steven Wright
Control
“Don’t be afraid of verbal abuse or criticism.
“Only the morally weak feel compelled to defend or explain themselves to others.
Let the quality of your deeds speak on your behalf. We can’t control the impressions others form about us, and the effort to do so only debases our character.
“So if anyone should tell you that a particular person has spoken critically of you, don’t bother with excuses or defenses. Just smile and reply, ‘I guess that person doesn’t know about all my other faults. Otherwise he wouldn’t have mentioned only these.’ ”
—Epictetus, Manual for Living: A New Interpretation (Sharon Lebell, 1994)
Persistence
“‘But there’s no remaking reality,’ he said, softly rubbing [his daughter’s] back and stroking her hair and rocking her gently in his arms. ‘Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes. There’s no other way.’”
—Philip Roth, Everyman (2006)
Transformation
Vincent (played by Tom Cruise): “Hey, Eddie, what are you going to do when I kick your ass?”
Fast Eddie Felson (played by Paul Newman): “Pick myself up and let you kick me again.”
Vincent: “Oh, yeah?”
Eddie: “Yeah ... Just don’t put the money in the bank, kid. Because if I don’t whip you now I’m going to whip you next month in Dallas.”
Carmen (played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio): “You mean Houston. There’s nothing coming up in Dallas.”
Eddie: “Houston. Dallas. And if not then the month after that in New Orleans.”
Vincent: “Oh yeah? What makes you so sure?”
Eddie: “Hey: I’m back!”
—The Color of Money (1986)
Collected
“The image of the dummy, the hick, is one more thing that [Larry] Bird uses to his advantage, like his jump shot, or, more to the point, his head-fake. ‘Like I tell people,’ he says, ‘I’m not the smartest guy in life, but on the basketball court I consider myself an A-plus. Not that I’m dumb. I can keep up with 90 percent of the people in this world. I just don’t explain myself to people. I want to keep ‘em guessing. The way they take me is the way they take me.”
—John Papanek, “Gifts That God Didn’t Give,” Sports Illustrated (November 9, 1981)
Purpose
“‘Do not attempt to spare my feelings,’ returned Cronshaw, with a wave of his fat hand. ‘I do not attach any exaggerated importance to my poetical works. Life is there to be lived rather than to be written about. My aim is to search out the manifold experience that it offers, wringing from each moment what of emotion it presents. I look upon my writing as a graceful accomplishment which does not absorb but rather adds pleasure to existence. As for posterity — damn posterity.’”
—M. Sommerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage, Chapter XLV (Penguin Classics edition, 1992)
Resolve
I’ve make mistakes
And I’ve been hard hit
I say so what
So what if I did
I’m the clear eyed
I’m the comeback kid
Start it over
Start it over again
I’m the clear eyed
I’m the comeback kid
—The Midnight, “Comeback Kid,” Endless Summer (2016)