Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You know you're living with the habit of zest if you purposefully choose the scenic route to wherever you are going. Or you choose clothing because you love the texture of the fabric. Or you pick a shampoo or cleaning product because you love the smell - smell being just as important to you as how the product works.
Messy stuff irritates me. I don't like messiness. If you leave something around my house, I'll tell you to move it back, clean it up, throw it in the trash - don't matter, just get rid of it. I need stuff neat, organized. And once I start cleaning stuff, I don't stop until it's done. Otherwise I'm irritated all day.
I think you can totally be a totally normal kid from the suburbs of Chicago and go off and play shows. It's one of those things that when you go home, you're still the nerd you were when you left, and your parents still get to yell at you about cleaning up your room, and your girlfriend still drags you to the pet store.
Carol Burnett probably had the biggest influence on me as kid. Although I was very young and watched her a lot in reruns, I was mesmerized by the way she transformed, by her physical comedy and the rolling laughter from the live studio audience. I loved her most as Scarlett O'Hara and her well known Cleaning Lady character.
If you love God, you can't hate anything or anyone. If the love one offers is met with hate, it doesn't die, rather it manifests in the form of compassion. That is universal love. It is not just a sentiment. It cannot be manifested merely by a shift in mental disposition. It can only come from inner cleaning, an inner awakening.
I was cleaning out the pigsty at a farm in Wales, where my mother had rented a room, when the results of my final school exam were handed to me by the postman, along with the news that I had a state scholarship to Oxford. I had waited for this letter for so many weeks that I had abandoned hope, deciding that I had failed ignominiously.
I was raised by a single mother who made a way for me. She used to scrub floors as a domestic worker, put a cleaning rag in her pocketbook and ride the subways in Brooklyn so I would have food on the table. But she taught me as I walked her to the subway that life is about not where you start, but where you're going. That's family values.
One of my fondest memories growing up in Rwanda was seeing everyone participating in community-building activities. This happened every Saturday at the end of month. People work together in cleaning streets, planting trees, and take care of each other by facilitating productive conversations and actions that are beneficial for the society.
I've obviously used fans - I wouldn't say all my life, because we couldn't afford them when I was young, but from my 20s and onwards we've had to use fans. And I've always loathed them. Everything about them. The way you adjust them, getting them at the angle you want. Carrying them. Cleaning them. The danger of putting your finger in them.
We'd lie on the floor, turn the lights out, put two speakers on either side of our ears, and try to blow our minds with music. I know that I want to make a record that does that yet a record that, if it was played on the radio at twelve in the afternoon, the guy making the wall - the guy cleaning the motorway - he's got a melody to hang on.
I've loved singing since forever. Whether it was with my sisters while cleaning the kitchen, putting shows on for my stuffed animals, writing songs about my stuffed animals, starting an a capella group with my cousins while on vacation, or awkwardly singing along to karaoke tracks alone in my bedroom - singing always found a way into my life.
My dishes tend to have a very carefree style: what's ripe at the farmers market or what's in my fridge, even if I'm cleaning out my fridge. It tends to be a very improvisational style. I major in salads, but a loose definition of salad; it can have a real robust skirt steak on top of it off the grill or quinoa or buckwheat or sprouted almond.
My greatest pleasure is going out on a horrible, cold, wet January morning to pick the vegetables for our Sunday lunch, putting them in a muddy pile on the table, and then spending 45 minutes washing and preparing them. I like doing it because it's so different to what I do in the week. The same holds for cleaning the car or shining my shoes.
When I did 'Baby Got Back,' that was just a reflection of the African-American community. We've always liked curves, and a lot of people misunderstood it because let's face it: 20 years prior to 'Baby Got Back,' the only images you saw of a black woman on television were she was probably 300 pounds and cleaning the house with a rag on her head.
As security or firewall administrators, we've got basically the same concerns [as plumbers]: the size of the pipe, the contents of the pipe, making sure the correct traffic is in the correct pipes, and keeping the pipes from splitting and leaking all over the place. Of course, like plumbers, when the pipes do leak, we're the ones responsible for cleaning up the mess, and we're the ones who come up smelling awful.
I feel the change. I feel the relationship with New York changing. It's a personal relationship you have with the city when you move there. I definitely romanticize the early 2000s. As much as I prefer the city then as opposed to now, I'm sure if I were 23 and I moved to the New York of right now, I could have the same exact experience. I don't really hate the cleaning up of New York, even though it's not my preferred version of New York.
