“You get to the point where you evolve in your life where everything isn’t black and white, good and bad, and you try to do the right thing. You might not like that. You might be very cynical about that. Well, fuck it, I don’t care what you think. I’m trying to do the right thing. I’m tired of Republican-Democrat politics. They can take the job and shove it. I come from a blue-collar background. I’m trying to do the right thing, and that’s where I’m going with this.”
— Republican New York State Senator Roy McDonald, age 64, on why he is voting for gay marriage. (via travishelwig)

Help me remember where this is from?

For a project I’m working on I’m trying to find a reference to a description of heaven that made an impression in the recesses of my brain, but I’m having trouble pinning down its source. The gist is that heaven is described as perpetually existing in one moment from your life in which you were truly content. I think this is from a scene in a movie in which…I think possibly a Native American character…possibly an ex-convict?…was explaining this to someone else…I am not sure. Those clues might lead you astray, but the gist is what I really remember. I think also I might be confusing this with the Tralfamadorians description of a pseudo-afterlife from Slaughterhouse-Five, but I could be wrong there too. 

In conclusion, can you help me?

“A writer is someone who spends years patiently trying to discover the second being inside him, and the world that makes him who he is: when I speak of writing, what comes first to my mind is not a novel, a poem, or literary tradition, it is a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward; amid its shadows, he builds a new world with words. This man – or this woman – may use a typewriter, profit from the ease of a computer, or write with a pen on paper, as I have done for 30 years. As he writes, he can drink tea or coffee, or smoke cigarettes. From time to time he may rise from his table to look out through the window at the children playing in the street, and, if he is lucky, at trees and a view, or he can gaze out at a black wall. He can write poems, plays, or novels, as I do. All these differences come after the crucial task of sitting down at the table and patiently turning inwards. To write is to turn this inward gaze into words, to study the world into which that person passes when he retires into himself, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy. As I sit at my table, for days, months, years, slowly adding new words to the empty page, I feel as if I am creating a new world, as if I am bringing into being that other person inside me, in the same way someone might build a bridge or a dome, stone by stone. The stones we writers use are words. As we hold them in our hands, sensing the ways in which each of them is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes almost caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.”
— Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech, December 2006 (via petitefeministe)

“Your problem is how you are going to spend this one and precious life you have been issued. Whether you’re going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.”
— Anne Lamott, in her commencement speech at Berkeley . (via katespencer)