Birthing, dying, and all the business in between

Just started reading Best American Essays 2006 and came across a couple sentences in Poe Ballantine's piece 501 minutes to Christ*, which I would classify as quotable quotes.

"Like pornography, the news is a lurid concoction that panders to the basest emotions."

True indeed of much of what is on TV these days!

Another good quote (written in the context of a crazy woman, narrating weird tales to fellow passengers on a bus, being on the wrong bus...but I think it applies more widely to life in general!)

"I suppose the joy of finding an appreciative audience is better any day than some feeble notion of a destination."

Also, a few sentences from the Introduction by the editor, Laura Slater, that one can appreciate in our darker cynical moments: (emphasis mine)

"Sickness is the natural state in which we humans reside. We occasionally fall into brief brackets of health, only to return to our fevers, our infections, our rapid, minute mutations, which take us toward death even as they evolve us, as a species, into some ill-defined future.

The essays in this volume are powerful, plainspoken meditations on birthing, dying, and all the business in between. They reflect the best of what we, as a singular species, have to offer, which is reflection in a context of kindness......"

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* I just found out that the essay can be read online (pdf) for free at its original publication in The Sun Magazine. Do read it...the author takes you on a wild weird ride on the kind of journey we'd never take, to places we'd never go to...and yet can associate with its basest moments! Isn't that what reading is all about? :)