I always start the new year like most people, spending quality time with friends and family, some reflection and goal setting, with good food, many cheers, and hearty laughs. I also often choose a wonderful book or two to go on an adventure with during the holidays, because it is always worth the while. This time, I got lucky finding a paperback copy of an old Richard Bach collection, titled “Curious Lives: Adventures from the Ferret Chronicles”, was glad to meet up with ferret friends, old and new both, and got valuable reminders about the courtesies and living accordingly to our highest sense of right, along with the fun ride.
Here are my favorite lines from the book:
- Whatever harm I would do to another, I shall do first to myself. As I respect and am kind to myself, so shall I respect and be kind to peers, to elders, to kits. I claim for others the freedom to live as they wish, to think and believe as they will. I claim that freedom for myself. I shall make each choice and live each day to my highest sense of right.
- Once, long ago, we changed our minds: end violence. In its place, no matter what: courtesy.
- If you excel at your craft, there is a good chance that curious ferrets will need to know why, to find out what makes you different.
- With the adventures we choose and the mysteries we solve we build our own credentials, write our own introduction to others around the world who value adventure and mystery themselves.
- Trust. There’s a light, when we close our eyes, the light of what we want to do more than anything else in the world. Trust that light. Follow, wherever it leads.
- Giving our visions and stories and characters to become friends to others lifts not only ourselves but the world and all its futures.
- “There’s a time to work on a book and you know it,” said the muse. “There’s a time to think about the story, a time to care about your readers, your publisher, about rhythm and timing and grammar and spelling and punctuation, about design and advertising and publicity. But none of those times, Budgeron, is when you’re writing!”
- Her husband had told her long ago that she didn’t need to please everyone with her stories – if a book pleases only half of one percent of the reading public, though no one else bought a single copy, it will be a massive bestseller.
- Budgeron Ferret had chosen to be a writer. With his choice came poverty, loneliness, rejection, frustration, despair, perseverance, delight, attention, riches, love, understanding, fulfilment, a life of ideas that mattered to him, shared now and then with kings and kits.
- How strange, he thought. Find the greatest teachers, ask the hardest questions, they never say, ‘Study philosophy’, or, ‘Get your degree’. They say, ‘You already know’.
- The mark of true flight is not our altitude but our attitude, not our speed but our joy in the paths we find above the earth.
- No one taught her, but she knew: more important than talent or gifts or education is the determination to make one’s wish come true.
- “Vink, if you want to meet the one ferret who can fix any trouble, no matter how bad it is, the one who can bring you happiness when nobody else can do it – why, just look in the mirror and say hello.”
One Software Tester 