Decius:

Is our curse the endless pursuit of a happiness which can never be attained?

Ed Tom Bell:

You can say it's my job to fight it but I don't know what it is anymore.

More than that, I don't want to know. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He would have to say, okay, I'll be part of this world.

Julian Schnabel:

Being in the water alone sharpens a particular kind of concentration, an ability to agree with the ocean, to react with a force that is larger than you are.

Maria Bustillos:

It's high time people stopped kvetching about Wikipedia, which has long been the best encyclopedia available in English, and started figuring out what it portends instead.

It's not perfect, of course, but neither is any other human-derived resource, including, as if it were necessary to say so, printed encyclopedias or books. It bears mentioning that if Wikipedia is a valuable resource, that is because a lot of people -- untold thousands, in fact -- are busting tail to make it that way.

Marshall McLuhan's insights, though they are being lived by millions every day, will take a long time to become fully manifest. But it's already clear that Wikipedia, along with other crowd-sourced resources, is wreaking a certain amount of McLuhanesque havoc on conventional notions of "authority," "authorship," and even "knowledge."

A lot of things have changed since 2006, but Jaron Lanier's mind is not among them. Seriously, reading his stuff is like watching a guy lose his shirt at the roulette wheel and still he keeps on grimly putting everything on the same number.

Events have long ago overtaken the small matter of "the independent author." The question that counts now is: the line between author and reader is blurring, whether we like it or not. How can we use that incontrovertible fact to all our benefit?

Maybe disagreement doesn't have to be a battle to be fought to the death; it can be embraced, even savored.

Chris Jones:

The lights come back on. Roger Ebert stays in his chair, savoring, surrounded by his notes.

Bustillos:

"The sadness of our age is characterized by the shackles of individualism," Bob Stein said. But are we throwing off those shackles, even as we speak?

James Reston, as quoted in Understanding Media:

A health director ... reported this week that a small mouse, which presumably had been watching television, attacked a little girl and her full-grown cat ... Both mouse and cat survived, and the incident is recorded here as a reminder that things seem to be changing.