Kelli Jae Baeli

“I will not dumb myself down to make someone else more comfortable with their ignorance.”

“I've never seen Salisbury steak on a restaurant menu. It's only in frozen dinners. Is there something we should know about that? What IS Salisbury steak anyway? And where do they hunt or harvest the salisburies?”

“I want to make the choice that gives an accurate impression of who I am; and who I am is someone who wants to be ethical, evolved, yet not at all an oil pan for the machinations of the morally corrupt.”

“Faulkner had an egg carton filled with periods and throughout his writing career, used nearly all of them.”

“Sully's, on South Prospect, was the quintessential biker-bar, complete with hefty, leather-clad Harley worshippers, and stringy-haired heroin-addicted women who made the rounds among the bikers. Its décor was decidedly Medieval Garage Sale, with a dose of Americana thrown in. An old motorcycle carcass dangled from the vaulted section of the beamed ceiling, and the wood plank floors were littered with butts, scarred by bottle caps and splattered with homogenized bodily fluids. The only light to be had was from neon, dying sconces, and lit cigarettes. Various medieval swords perched on each wall, reminiscent of the times of Beowulf and Fire Dragons on the Barrow.”

“These thrill seeker people doing extreme sports...they have a hideous accident, go through agonizing recovery, and then go back to that activity that nearly killed them...that's not facing your fear, that's embracing your stupidity.”

“You're only responsible for being honest, not for someone else's reaction to your honesty.”

“Progress should never be impeded by a need to coddle adults who respond to the world as children.”

“If I say I do not believe in faeries or elves or trolls, does this imply that I have a set of beliefs and a lifestyle that adheres to this lack of belief? NO, IT ONLY IMPLIES that I do not believe in faeries, elves and trolls. So one cannot extrapolate morality, philosophy, cosmology, character, political party, or any other thing of that sort from the mere lack of belief in one other thing.”

“The supernatural worldview is causing a great number of otherwise intelligent people to cling to a collection of atavistic concepts that have not, and never will serve humanity in any ultimately beneficial way. Any benefits that spirituality ostensibly provides to its adherents, can be found equally in the worldview of philosophy and ethics, communities of other kinds, and so on. It's a myth that the only morality, hope, purpose and comfort to be found, resides only in the supernatural.”

“Some people have goodness and merit buried deep inside and we glimpse it and see its value but ultimately it's covered by so much dirt that it's a 24/7 exercise in archaeology.”

“You can bail water 24/7, and no matter how good you are at not sinking, you still have a hole in your boat.”

“Am I too much for the world, or is the world too much for me?”

“The conundrum of sanity and insanity, is that it serves us to be some of each. It's really only a question of degrees. You cannot possibly be 100% adjusted and live in this INSANE world. A little bit of crazy is a coping skill.”

“I'm an open book. But some of the pages are stuck together.”

“You have to be able to recognize your truths in the daylight before you can find them in the dark.”

“It's one thing to say you think someone "hung the moon" but that generally means you are blind and deluded, and then the relationship fails because they say you changed, when really, they never saw you at all...The real test is if someone sees all your flaws or blemishes or individual differences, and they still think you hung the moon.”

“What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger...unless it instead snaps your spine. Then it makes you a paraplegic.”

“One of my biggest fears is that I'm going to die alone in my home, and my cats will eat me because I am too dead to open their food cans.”