Do your thing and don’t care if they like it.
- Tina Fey
born in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, The United States May 18, 1970
gender: female
genre: Humor, NonfictionElizabeth Stamatina “Tina” Fey is an American actress, comedian, writer and producer. She has received seven Emmy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, four Screen Actors Guild Awards, and four Writers Guild of America Awards. She was singled out as the performer who had the greatest impact on culture and entertainment in 2008 by the Associated Press, who gave her their AP Entertainer of the Year award.
After graduating from the University of Virginia in 1992, Fey moved to Chicago to take classes at the improvisational comedy group The Second City, where she became a featured player in 1994. Three years later, Fey became a writer for the sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live (SNL). She was promoted to the position of head writer in 1999. The following year, Fey was added to the cast of SNL. During her time there, she was co-anchor of the show’s Weekend Update segment. After leaving SNL in 2006, she created the television series called 30 Rock, a situation comedy loosely based on her experiences at SNL. In the series, Fey portrays the head writer of a fictional sketch comedy series.
In 2004, Fey made her film debut as writer and co-star of the teen comedy Mean Girls. In 2008, she starred in the comedy film Baby Mama, alongside Amy Poehler. In 2009, Fey won an Emmy Award for her satirical portrayal of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin in a guest appearance on SNL.
Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you … it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security, for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means Insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind.
It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre: “I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I can not afford to give. Responsibility to that means you yourself do not fall for shallow and easy solutions – predigested books and ideas … marrying early as an escape from real decisions, getting pregnant as an evasion of already existing problems.
It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short … and this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society that say women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us. That means we insist on a life of meaningful work, insist that work be as meaningful as love and friendship in our lives.
It means, therefore, the courage to be “different” … the difference between an actively lived life, and a life of passive drifting and dispersal of energies, is an immense difference. Once we begin to feel committed to our lives, responsible to ourselves, we can never again be satisfied with the old, passive way.
- Adrienne Rich
If books could have more, give more, be more, show more, they would still need readers who bring to them sound and smell and light and all the rest that can’t be in books.
The book needs you.- Gary Paulsen
born in The United States, May 17, 1939
website: http://www.randomhouse.com/features/garypaulsen/
genre: Literature & Fiction, Outdoors & NatureAlthough he was never a dedicated student, Paulsen developed a passion for reading at an early age. After a librarian gave him a book to read–along with his own library card–he was hooked. He began spending hours alone in the basement of his apartment building, reading one book after another.
Running away from home at the age of 14 and traveling with a carnival, Paulsen acquired a taste for adventure. A youthful summer of rigorous chores on a farm; jobs as an engineer, construction worker, ranch hand, truck driver, and sailor; and two rounds of the 1,180-mile Alaskan dog sled race, the Iditarod; have provided ample material from which he creates his stories.
Paulsen and his wife, Ruth Wright Paulsen, an artist who has illustrated several of his books, divide their time between a home in New Mexico and a boat in the Pacific.
There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
- Adrienne Rich
born in Baltimore, Maryland, The United States May 16, 1929
died: March 27, 2012
gender: female
genre: Poetry , Literature & Fiction , Gay & LesbianAdrienne Rich (b. 1929). Born to a middle-class family, Rich was educated by her parents until she entered public school in the fourth grade. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe College in 1951, the same year her first book of poems, A Change of World, appeared. That volume, chosen by WH Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and her next, The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (1955), earned her a reputation as an elegant, controlled stylist.
In the 1960s, however, Rich Began in dramatic shift away from her earlier mode as she took up political and feminist themes and stylistic experimentation in works longer available as Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), The Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), and The Will to Change (1971). In Diving into the Wreck (1973) and The Dream of a Common Language (1978), she continued to experiment with form and to deal with the experiences and aspirations of women from a feminist perspective.
Rich has published many essays on poetry, feminism, motherhood, and lesbianism. Her recent collections include An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991) and Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 (1995).
If you start with a cage containing five monkeys and inside the cage, hang a banana on a string from the top and then you place a set of stairs under the banana, before long a monkey will go to the stairs and climb toward the banana.
As soon as he touches the stairs, you spray all the other monkeys with cold water.
After a while another monkey makes an attempt with same result all the other monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Pretty soon when another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it.
Now, put the cold water away.
Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one.
The new monkey sees the banana and attempts to climb the stairs. To his shock, all of the other monkeys beat the crap out of him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs he will be assaulted.
Next, remove another of the original five monkeys, replacing it with a new one.
The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment…… with enthusiasm, because he is now part of the “team”.
Then, replace a third original monkey with a new one, followed by the fourth, then the fifth. Every time the newest monkey takes to thestairs, he is attacked.
Now, the monkeys that are beating him up have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs. Neither do they know why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey.
Finally, having replaced all of the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys will have ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, not one of the monkeys will try to climb the stairway for the banana.
Why, you ask? Because in their minds…that is the way it has always been!
This, my friends, is how authoritarian administrations, like governments, operate… and this is why, from time to time:
ALL of the monkeys need to be REPLACED AT THE SAME TIME.
Author: Unknown
Photo credit: Google
To see things in the seed, that is genius.
– Lao Tzu
Laozi was a philosopher of ancient China, best known as the author of the Tao Te Ching. His association with the Tào Té Chīng has led him to be traditionally considered the founder of philosophical Taoism.
Born: 400 BC, Henan
Died: 531 BC, China
Movies: Seers and Clowns- Wikipedia
His books were the closest thing he had to furniture and he lived in them the way other men live in easy chairs.
- Laura Hillenbrand
born in Fairfax, Virginia, The United States May 15, 1967
gender: female
website: http://laurahillenbrandbooks.com/
genre: HistoryLaura Hillenbrand (born 1967) is the author of the acclaimed Seabiscuit: An American Legend, a non-fiction account of the career of the great racehorse Seabiscuit, for which she won the William Hill Sports Book of the Year in 2001. The book later became the basis of the 2003 movie Seabiscuit. Her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Equus magazine, American Heritage, The Blood-Horse, Thoroughbred Times, The Backstretch, Turf and Sport Digest, and many other publications. Her 1998 American Heritage article on the horse Seabiscuit won the Eclipse Award for Magazine Writing.
Born in Fairfax, Virginia, Hillenbrand studied at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, but was forced to leave before graduation when she contracted chronic fatigue syndrome, which she has struggled with ever since. She now lives in Washington, D.C.
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/30913.Laura_Hillenbrand
