"It's the dark dangerous side of creativity. The more your heart and soul are involved in this means of expression, the wider are going to be your swings of emotion. It's that connection between artistic excellence and instability. There's a psychic toll that has to be paid." -Kris Kristofferson

"You finally have to realize that what's really important is your own life. If I'm going to use as a criteria for my happiness someone else's opinion of what I'm doing and their rejection of what I think is good, then I'm going to be very unhappy." -Phil Everly

"Success is achieved by developing our strengths, not by eliminating our weaknesses." -Marilyn vos Savant

"One cannot be creative without being out there and alone; the extent of the aloneness depends on the extent of the creativity. The more creative the act, the more completely alone one is." -Charles F. Wetherall

"Daydreaming, sleeping, meditating, being hypnotized, and being high (on drugs or alcohol) are all examples of altered states. The mental state during the act of creating is also considered to be altered. Awareness is focused inward to our non-ordinary reality. We do things to attempt to free the right hemisphere of the brain from the dominance of the left so that we can temporarily achieve an altered state of consciousness. The desire for the altered state is not harmful, but often the ways that we attempt to achieve it are." -Bev Mabee

"Gifted children are different in the way they learn - in the efficiency, complexity, sophistication, and speed of their thinking processes. Thus it is in school that their difference is most critical. Parents must stop accepting part-time approaches that fail to deal with the underlying problems - inappropriate material, inappropriate methods and rate of presentation, and lack of depth and breadth in the basic school curriculum. It makes no sense to keep gifted children learning at a rate that is slow motion for them and may turn them off or shut them down. It is our responsibility to help them accept and deal with their differences. When we propose full-time programs for gifted students we must not be deterred by the buzzwords undemocratic or elitist. We accept Harvard law, Wharton business, Yale drama - all schools for the gifted. It's time to demand full-time special classes for all gifted students, no matter what grade they are in." -Stephanie Tolan

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