Quote of the Day: Monday, September 12, 2005

"Writing has always - and always will, I'm sure - scared the hell out of me. I'll do just about anything to get out of it, and have been known to spend whole afternoons circling my desk like a dog, wary, unwilling to commit to writing a single word. What is so frightening about it? I still don't know. Perhaps it's the horrible knowledge that no matter how well you write, the resultant product will never correlate exactly to the truth, will never arrive with quite the melodious voice you hear in the acoustic cavity of your mind." - Brenda Miller, from her Essay, "A Braided Heart: Shaping the Lyric Essay"

Quote of the Week: Monday, September 5, 2005

"In writing the poem I make the connection, find the neural pathways to a deeply felt memory-generated emotion. That is how I know it is the Truth (not to be mistaken by the Fact). Once I have located the Truth, I have the Subject. Not the triggering subject, but the Thing that I must use as the basis of my essay or story. It is not that the poem and the prose are the same Thing, only that they come from the same source. I use this technique in order to answer the all-important question I must ask before I commit my time, my energies, and my heart to a writing project: Is it worth part of my life? Who cares if I make this poem or story? If I am passionate enough about something to write a poem, then it is worth my time and no one else needs to care about it. It is necessary to me." - Judith Ortiz Cofer, from her essay "But Tell It Slant: From Poetry to Prose and Back Again"

Quote of the Week: Monday, June 20

"Innovation as an approach to business growth is simply lazy. Actually it's worse than that; it's dangerous... So now we've got a bunch of companies that have forgotten all that boring stuff that made them successful in the first place and are getting into areas they don't know anything about and have no business being in at all. A lot of these companies are showing their commitment to this strategy by creating a new position: CIO. No, that's not Chief Information Officer. It's - yep, you guessed it - Chief Innovation Officer. And these CIOs are rattling on and on about how the company is "retooling" and "charting a new course" and "exploring new opportunities." And let's not forget about "driving double-digit top-line growth." The fact that all that top-line growth will probably come at the expense of the more important bottom line doesn't seem to bother anyone. Except me. - Sergio Zyman, former Chief Marketing Officer, Coca-Cola Company, in his book "Renovate Before You Innovate: Why Doing the NEW thing Might NOT Be the RIGHT Thing"