Valesky Quotes & Sayings

Like any of life's refining fires, cancer is a potentially profound learning experience. So what did I learn? I learned that profound learning experiences are vastly overrated. — Joni Rodgers

Back inside, I'm shown an antique cabinet in which members of the community, famous for their homegrown produce, dried herbs.
The Oneida Community was an upstate tourist attraction right from the start, second, Valesky says, to Niagara Falls. I'm taking the same guided tour offered a hundred and fifty years ago to prim rubbernecks who came here to peep at sex fiends. I wonder how many of my vacationing forebears went home disappointed? They thought they were taking the train to Gomorrah but instead they got to watch herbs dry. Valesky opens a drawer in the herb cabinet so I can get a whiff. He mentions that back in the day, when one tourist was shown the cabinet she rudely asked her community-member guide, "What's that odor?" To which the guide replied, "Perhaps it's the odor of crushed selfishness." Valesky grins. "How about that for a utopian answer?" To my not particularly utopian nose, crushed selfishness smells a lot like cilantro. — Sarah Vowell

I grew up in a one-parent family. I worked my way through college, I had very average grades and I was very average looking, but I've lived a remarkable life only because I believed I could. — Georgette Mosbacher

Skyjackers had a pretty abysmal success rate - once you commandeered a plane in American airspace, your odds of a happy ending were slim. After the epidemic ended in 1973, what folks tended to remember most about the skyjackers was their futility. — Brendan I. Koerner

It is interesting how one word can spark memories that one believes she has buried beyond recognition. — Mandy Nachampassack-Maloney

Nothing that occurs in life is random or without purpose. Lessons were found within each event in our lives that, positive or negative, ultimately instilled a peaceful mind in us. — Michelle Cruz-Rosado

In our bones we need the natural curves of hills, the scent of chaparral, the whisper of pines, the possibility of wildness. — Richard Louv