quotation debate, part II

[Tunesmith]

Hfox's last quote:

Memory, so complete and clear or so evasive, has to be ended, has to be put aside, as if one were leaving a chapel and bringing the prayer to an end in one's head.

~ Harold Brodkey

[Tunesmith]

One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.

~Emily Dickinson

[brightpearl]

^finally, something by Emily Dickinson that can't be sung to the tune of the Yellow Rose of Texas (http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Olympus/7472/emily.html).
---------------------------------------------------------

The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.

~Hunter S. Thompson

[β cyg]

every truth has two sides; it is as well to look at both before we commit ourselves to either.

aesop

[12"razormix]

for the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. to be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very center of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. the observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.

charles baudelaire

[zero]

what's wrong with society? what's wrong is that people give up searching and sit back and blend in with the crowd. but that's not who i want to be. blending in is not my thing.


kamanda ndama

[T.I.P.]

Will it blend ?


blendtec guy

[zero]

i'm afraid that everything will get homogenized and be the same.

- david byrne

[Hyakujo's Fox]

Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as it ever was
Same as
it
ever
was

~ david byrne

[T.I.P.]

Burn hollywood burn


~Public Enemy

[brightpearl]

you say you don't wike it
I say you'we a wiar
but when we kiiiiiiiiiiiisss
it's wike fi-wuh.

Robin Williams as Elmer Fudd as Bruce Springsteen.

[zero]

my wife has a slight impediment in her speech... every now and then she stops to breathe.

- jimmy durante

[12"razormix]

i love you more than i have ever found a way to say to you.

ben folds

[zero]

ohhw LESLEY!!...thanks very much ... [regains composure] ... um..yeh well i've got this thing about my name, y'know, because it just sounds like a sort of sausage advert.

- billy mackenzie

[12"razormix]

HANK: Don't you wish we could still say words like "meat" and "tool" and "unit" without someone turning it into something foul? Well, those are our words. I say we take 'em back.

[zero]

BOBBY: I refuse to eat the white man's white meat!

[Hyakujo's Fox]

Boredom is the root of all evil - the despairing refusal to be oneself.

~ Soren Kierkegaard

[brightpearl]

We are all primary numbers divisible only by ourselves. ~Jean Guitton

[zero]

wax statue of mine shall one day be seen at madam tussaud's

- omkar

[Hyakujo's Fox]

Fame like a wayward girl, will still be coy - To those who woo her with too slavish knees.

~ John Keats

[12"razormix]

he shows great originality, which must be curbed at all cost.

peter ustinov

[zero]

them of those, i am who are phrasing sentences.

- charles michael de feo

[brightpearl]

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together

-John Lennon

[zero]

Gildersleeve: He-he-he-he-he. Kind of outsmarted you. Eh, little chum?
Bugs Bunny: Hey, wait. Wait a minute. Say that again.

[12"razormix]

we would rather speak ill of ourselves than not talk about ourselves at all.

françois duc de la rochefoucauld

[zero]

thy sea, o god, so great,
my boat so small!
it cannot be that any happy fate,
will me befall!

- anon

[12"razormix]

pure love produces pure nonsense.

jonathan klinger

[Hyakujo's Fox]

I'm section eight, Head to toe. I'm wearing a Warner bra. I like to play with dolls. My last wish is to be buried in my mother's wedding gown. I'm nuts.

~ Corporal Klinger

[brightpearl]

The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins.
~Oliver Wendell Holmes

[Hyakujo's Fox]

Sometimes a person we love, through no fault of his own, can't see past the end of his nose.

~ Mary Poppins*





* but what the fark would she know? ;)

[Hyakujo's Fox]

Sometimes I'm so sweet even I can't stand it.

~ Julie Andrews

[trisherina]

align yourself
resign yourself
if you don't know who you are you can remind yourself

-- Bottle Rockets

[12"razormix]

well, i know who you are
and what league you played in

bob dylan

[zero]

it wasn't him, charley, it was you. remember that night in the garden you came down to my dressing room and you said, "kid, this ain't your night. we're going for the price on wilson." you remember that? "this ain't your night"! my night! i coulda taken wilson apart! so what happens? he gets the title shot outdoors on the ballpark and what do i get? a one-way ticket to palookaville! you was my brother, charley, you shoulda looked out for me a little bit. you shoulda taken care of me just a little bit so i wouldn't have to take them dives for the short-end money ... you don't understand, i coulda had class. i coulda been a contender. i coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what i am, let's face it. it was you, charley.

marlon brando - on the waterfront

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

... Games and sports aren’t about taking part or even about winning. Games and sports’re really about humiliating your enemies...

... About a third of the Runners got captured and turned into Bulldogs for the next pass. I hate that about British Bulldogs. It forces you to be a traitor...

... I just lay there and let them convert me into a Bulldog. In my heart I’d always be a Runner...

David Mitchell: Black Swan Green

[Veruki]

Who are you really? And what were you before? And what did you do? And what did you think?
~Rick Blaine-Casablanca

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

The weekend stretched ahead of him, one football game the extent of his plans. His living room was wreathed in shadows and cigarette smoke. He kept thinking of selling the flat, finding somewhere with fewer ghosts. Then again, they were the only company he had: dead colleagues, victims, expired relationships. He reached again for the bottle, but it was empty. Stood up and watched the floor sway beneath him. He thought he had a fresh bottle in the carrier bag beneath the window, but the bag was empty and crumpled. He looked out of his window, catching his reflection and its puzzled frown. Had he left a bottle in the car? Had he brought home two bottles or just one? He thought of a dozen places where he could get a drink. The city – his city – was out there waiting for him, waiting to show its dark, shrivelled heart.

Ian Rankin: Set in Darkness

[Hyakujo's Fox]

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!

~ Charles Dickens

[Marcus Bales]

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.
--Raymond Chandler

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

And there would be the part she most enjoyed, the team get-together at the end of the day when AD, herself and Benton-Smith would ponder over the evidence, picking up, discarding or clicking the clues into place as they might the pieces of a jigsaw. But she knew the root of the small sprig of shame. Although they had never spoken of it she suspected that AD felt the same. With this jigsaw the pieces were the broken lives of men and women.

P.D. James: The Lighthouse

[Marcus Bales]

Be as decent as you can. Don't believe without evidence. Treat things divine with marked respect -- don't have anything to do with them. Do not trust humanity without collateral security; it will play you some scurvy trick. Remember that it hurts no one to be treated as an enemy entitled to respect until he shall prove himself a friend worthy of affection. Cultivate a taste for distasteful truths. And, finally, most important of all, endeavor to see things as they are, not as they ought to be.

-- Ambrose Bierce

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

We always stand on an island,’ she said, ‘the cold place of not knowing, and not being able to care.

William Brodrick: the gardens of the dead

[12"razormix]

Once when I was in Hawaii, on the island of Kauai, I met a mysterious old stranger. He said he was about to die and wanted to tell someone about the treasure. I said, 'Okay, as long as it's not a long story. Some of us have a plane to catch, you know.' He stared telling his story, about the treasure and his life and all, and I thought: 'This story isn't too long.' But then, he kept going, and I started thinking, 'Uh-oh, this story is getting long.' But then the story was over, and I said to myself: 'You know, that story wasn't too long after all.' I forget what the story was about, but there was a good movie on the plane. It was a little long, though."

Jack Handey

[Marcus Bales]

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.
– HL Mencken

[12"razormix]

why do you stay in prison
when the door is so wide open?

nonny jalal ad-din rumi

[zero]

with a hey and a ho and hey-nonny-no!
that o'er the green cornfield did pass,
hey-nonny-no, hey-nonny-no!
in the springtime, only ring time, birds do song,
hey-ding-a-ding-ding, hey-ding-a-ding-ding


- william shakespeare as you like it

[Marcus Bales]

The bells of hell go ring a ling a ling
For you but not for me
The demons grin and sing a ling a ling
In four-part harmony
They sing they'll off your ding a ling a ling
And eat it like a Brie
O Death where is thy sting a ling a ling
Or Grave thy victoreeeeeee?
The bells of hell go ring a ling a ling
For you but not for me.

-- anon, with help from the Poetry Rewrite Desk

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

Later she was scared. Of saying yes. Of saying no. Of saying yes then realising she should have said no. Of saying no then realising she should have said yes. Of being naked in front of another man when her body sometimes made her feel like weeping.

Mark Haddon: A Spot of Bother

[zero]

DEREK ZOOLANDER: im pretty sure there's a lot more to life than being really, really, ridiculously good looking. and i plan on finding out what that is.

[Marcus Bales]

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth — more than ruin -- more even than death. ... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.
– Bertrand Russell

[trisherina]

Consider the daffodil. And while you're doing that, I'll be over here, looking through your stuff.

-- Jack Handey

[Marcus Bales]

Whenever people say 'We mustn't be sentimental,' you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add 'We must be realistic,' they mean they are going to make money out of it.

-- Brigid Brophy

[12"razormix]

people see the world not as it is, but as they are.

al lee

[zero]

DONKEY: blue flower, red thorns! blue flower, red thorns! blue flower, red thorns! oh, this would be so much easier if i wasn't color-blind!

- from shrek

[Marcus Bales]

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as keeping out of politics. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

-George Orwell

[trisherina]

How did an allegedly free people spawn a vast, rampant cuttlefish of dominion with its tentacles in every orifice of the body politic?

P.J. O'Rourke, Parliament of Whores

[Hyakujo's Fox]

I would like to welcome our new squid overlords.

~ trisherina

[brightpearl]

A lot of my peer group think I'm an eccentric bisexual, like I may even have an ammonia-filled tentacle somewhere on my body. That's okay.

~Robert Downey, Jr.

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

He didn’t have a problem with homosexuality per se. Men having sex with men. One could imagine, if one was in the business of imagining such things, that there were situations where it might happen, situations in which chaps were denied the normal outlets. Military camps. Long sea voyages. One didn’t want to dwell on the plumbing but one could almost see it as a sporting activity. Letting off steam. High spirits. Handshake and a hot shower afterwards.
It was the thought of men purchasing furniture together which disturbed him. Men snuggling. More disconcerting, somehow, than shenanigans in public toilets. It gave him the unpleasant feeling that there was a weakness in the very fabric of the world. Like seeing a man hit a woman in the street. Or suddenly not being able to remember the bedroom you had as a child.
Still, things changed. Mobile phones. Thai restaurants. You had to remain elastic or you turned into an angry fossil railing at litter.

Mark Haddon: A Spot of Bother

[Marcus Bales]

'Don't blame me, Pongo,' said Lord Ickenham, 'if Lady Constance takes her lorgnette to you. God bless my soul, though, you can't compare the lorgnettes of today with the ones I used to know as a boy. I remember walking one day on Grosvenor Square with my Aunt Brenda and her pug dog Jabberwocky, and a policeman came up and said the latter ought to be wearing a muzzle. My aunt made no verbal reply. She merely whipped her lorgnette from its holder and looked at the man, who gave one choking gasp and fell back against the railings, eyes starting as if he had seen some dreadful sight. A doctor was sent for, and they managed to bring him round, but he was never the same again. He had to leave the Force, and eventually drifted into the grocery business. And that is how Sir Thomas Lipton got his start.’
-- PG Wodehouse, "Uncle Fred in the Springtime", 1939

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

It was an old pain returning to find that William Thornhill, felon, was waiting under the skin of William Thornhill, landowner.
...
A man’s heart was a deep pocket he might turn out and be amazed at what he found there.

Kate Grenville: The Secret River

[brightpearl]

A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.
~ Marian Evans (George Eliot)

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

I'm just a person trapped inside a woman's body.

Elayne Boosler

[trisherina]

And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

-- George Eliot

[Hyakujo's Fox]

If I was a woman who'd been to a ball,
Been hailed as a princess by one and by all;
Would I start weeping like a bathtub overflowing?
And carry on as if my home were in a tree?
Would I run off and never tell me where I'm going?
Why can't a woman be like me?

~ Professor Higgins

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

Men and women can never understand each other. Both want something else: the man the woman, the woman the man.

Frigyes Karinthy

[Hyakujo's Fox]

in the evening when her work is done
she descends from the mountain
and her hair takes on the sunset
and it makes it easy for me to forget

she speaks a different language
she speaks a different language
but i seem to understand

~ tex perkins

[zero]

language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the tower of babel by which men sought to scale the highest heavens.

- marshall mcLuhan

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

Language is the only homeland.

Czeslaw Milosz

[zero]

LYDON (mumbling): well that's just their tough shit.

GRUNDY: it's what?

LYDON: nothing. a rude word. next question!

GRUNDY: no, no. what was the rude word?

LYDON: shit.

GRUNDY: was it really? god, you frighten me to death.

LYDON: oh alright, siegfried…

GRUNDY: what about you girls behind?

MATLOCK: he's like yer dad ain’t he, this geezer. Or your Grandad.

GRUNDY: are you worried or just enjoying yourself?

SIOUXSIE: enjoying myself.

GRUNDY: are you?

SIOUXSIE: yeah.

GRUNDY: ah! that's what i thought you were doing.

SIOUXSIE: i've always wanted to meet you.

GRUNDY: did you really?

SIOUXSIE: yeah.

GRUNDY: we'll meet afterwards, shall we?

JONES: you dirty sod. you dirty old man.

GRUNDY: well keep going, chief. keep going. go on, you've got another ten seconds. say something outrageous.

JONES: you dirty bastard.

GRUNDY: go on, again.

STEVE: you dirty fvcker!

GRUNDY: what a clever boy.

JONES: you fvcking rotter!

GRUNDY (to the camera): well that's it for tonight. i'll be seeing you soon. i hope l'll not be seeing you (the band) again. from me though, goodnight.

[12"razormix]

see the fine, upstanding, young men britain is chucking out these days.

johnny rotten

[zero]

exile is terrible to those who have, as it were, a circumscribed habitation; but not to those who look upon the whole globe but as one city.

- cicero

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

Here, there was a gathering of lower-rise blocks, four storeys high, along with a few rows of terraced houses.
“The houses were built for pensioners,” Rebus explained. “Something to do with keeping them within the community.”
“Nice dream, as Tom Yorke would say.”
That was Knoxland, all right: a nice dream. Plenty more like it elswhere in the city. Their architects would have been so proud of the scale drawings and cardboard models. Nobody ever set out to design a ghetto, after all.

Ian Rankin: Fleshmarket Close

[brightpearl]

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

~Laurie Anderson

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression 'as pretty as an airport.'

Douglas Adams: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

[12"razormix]

for every beauty there is an eye somewhere to see it.

ivan panin

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Anais Nin

[Hyakujo's Fox]

You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, 'Why not?'

- George Bernard Shaw

[zero]

the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.


arthur c. clarke - 16 december 1917 – 19 march 2008 R.I.P.

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Lewis Carroll

[12"razormix]

.

somewhere there is some place that one million eyes can't see
and somewhere there is someone who can see what i can see

sm

[zero]

.

there's four new colors in the rainbow ...

- james

[12"razormix]

.

can you see me
i'm in the lukewarm rain
try so very hard
you know i just can't explain
think of a colour
tell me what you see
that colour's red
you can take it from me

sm

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke around me I am in darkness — I am nothing. I only come into existence when the plumber, or the horse dealers, or whoever it may be, says something which sets me alight. Then how lovely the smoke of my phrase is, rising and falling, flaunting and falling, upon red lobsters and yellow fruit, wreathing them into one beauty.

Virginia Woolf

[zero]

.

the flowery style is not unsuitable to public speeches or addresses, which amount only to compliment. The lighter beauties are in their place when there is nothing more solid to say; but the flowery style ought to be banished from a pleading, a sermon, or a didactic work.


- voltaire

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can. That is the only secret of style.

Matthew Arnold

[zero]

if you want in on the Discordian Society
then declare yourself what you wish
do what you like
and tell us about it
or
if you prefer
don't.

there are no rules anywhere.
the goddess prevails.

- malaclypse the younger, principia discordia, page 00032

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

One of the goddesses had been having some very serious trouble with her dress, Brutha noticed; if Brother Nhumrod had been present, he would have had to hurry off for some very serious lying down.
"Petulia, Goddess of Negotiable Affection," said Om. "Worshiped by the ladies of the night and every other time as well, if you catch my meaning."
Brutha's mouth dropped open.
"They've got a goddess for painted jezebels?"
"Why not? Very religious people I understand. They're used to being on their-they spend so much time looking at the-look, belief is where you find it. Specialization. That's safe, see. Low risk, guaranteed returns. There's even a God of Lettuce somewhere. I mean, it's not as though any one else is likely to try to become a God of Lettuce. You just find a lettuce-growing community and hang on. Thunder gods come and go, but it's you they turn to every time when there's a bad attack of Lettuce Fly. You've got to . . . uh . . . hand it to Petulia. She spotted a gap in the market and filled it."
"There's a God of Lettuce?"
"Why not? If enough people believe, you can be god of anything . . ."

Terry Pratchett: Small Gods

[12"razormix]

i'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

terry pratchett

[zero]

you are the most powerful magnet in the universe! you contain a magnetic power within you that is more powerful than anything in this world! it is the unfathomable magnetic power that is emitted through your thoughts!

- rhonda byrne

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

Words can have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons, they can spin away from their initial orbit and enter a wider magnetic field. No one owns them or has a proprietary right to dictate how they will be used.

David Lehman

[12"razormix]

one must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.

hart crane

[zero]

on may 26, 1828 a mysterious teenage boy - a foundling, appeared in the streets of nuremberg, germany. he was wearing peasant clothing and could barely talk. a shoemaker took the boy to the house of captain von wessenig, where he would only repeat, "i want to be a cavalryman, as my father was," and "horse! horse!" further demands elicited only tears, or the obstinate proclamation of "don't know." he answered few questions, and his vocabulary appeared to be quite limited.

- werner herzog, the enigma of kaspar hauser

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

A politician ought to be born a foundling and remain a bachelor.

Claudia Lady Bird Johnson

[12"razormix]

a man should be upright, not be kept upright.

marcus aurelius

[zero]

[bill foster exits his car in the middle of the highway]
guy on freeway: hey, where do you think you're going?
bill foster: i'm going home!

[12"razormix]

i'm home home
home home home
and i'm home home
home home home
but i'm miles and miles and miles and miles and miles away

sm

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

Many people think that the homeless live on the whim of the moment. One minute they are there, in a doorway – as they have been for months – the next, they’re gone. In fact, these movements are decisions. Moving on is a kind of obedience – just like leaving home in the first place.

William Brodrick: the gardens of the dead

[zero]

peter: i live with boys. the lost boys. they are well named.

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

There were people who loved all sorts of extraordinary things and lived for their passions. Haydn was a perfectly respectable passion, as were trains, she supposed. W. H. Auden, or WHA as she called him, had appreciated steam engines, and had confessed that when he was a boy he had loved a steam engine which he thought “every bit as beautiful” as a person to whom his poem was addressed. You are my steam engine, one might say, in much the same way as the French addressed their lovers as mon petit chou, my little cabbage. How strange was human passion in its expression.

Alexander McCall Smith: Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

[zero]

a nickname is the hardest stone that the devil can throw at a man.

- william hazlitt

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

It’s easier to change your eyeballs than to change your nickname.

David Mitchell: Black Swan Green

[Hyakujo's Fox]

Breach for breach, eye for eye, tooth for tooth: as he hath caused a blemish in a man, so shall it be done to him again.

~ God (attrib.)

[Anna]

An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
-Mahatma Gandhi, (attributed)

[Hyakujo's Fox]

A sailor meets a pirate in a bar, and they take turns recounting their adventures at sea. Noting the pirate's peg-leg, hook, and eye patch The sailor asks "So, how did you end up with the peg-leg?"

The pirate replies "We was caught in a monster storm off the cape and a giant wave swept me overboard. Just as they were pullin' me out, a school of sharks appeared and one of 'em bit me leg off".

"Blimey!" said the sailor. "What about the hook"?

"Ahhhh...", mused the pirate, "We were boardin' a trader ship, pistols blastin' and swords swingin' this way and that. In the fracas me hand got chopped off."

"Zounds!" remarked the sailor. "And how came ye by the eye patch"?

"A seagull droppin' fell into me eye", answered the pirate.

"You lost your eye to a seagull dropping?" the sailor asked incredulously.

"Well..." said the pirate, "..it was me first day with the hook."

~ Traditional

[zero]

johnson: do the punchline.

reg: what punchline?

johnson: the punchline for this bit.

reg: i don't know it. they didn't say anything about a punchline.

[Anna]

The Devil: Your soul is like your appendix.You never use it.

Elliot Richards: Oh yeah? If it's so useless, how come you want it so bad?

The Devil: Oh, aren't you a clever one?

[Marcus Bales]

Faust: How comes it then that thou art now out of hell with me?

Mefistofeles: Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it. Thinks thou that I, who saw the face of God and tasted the eternal joys of heaven, am not tormented with ten thousand hells in being deprived of everlasting bliss?

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

Rincewind had been told that death was just like going into another room. The difference is, when you shout, "Where's my clean socks?", no-one answers.

Terry Pratchett: Eric

[Marcus Bales]

I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather... Not screaming and yelling like the passengers in his car.

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

My great-grandmother was your great-great-grandfather's mistress, so how about it?

Camilla Parker Bowles

[Anna]

If thou didst ever thy dear father love, revenge his foul and most unnatural murder. Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard, a serpent stung me. So the whole ear of Denmark is by a forged process of my death rankly abused. But know, thou noble youth, the serpent that did sting thy father's life now wears his crown. Thy uncle, ay, that incestuous, that adulterous beast, with witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts- O wicked wit and gifts, that have the power so to seduce!- won to his shameful lust the will of my most seeming virtuous queen.

[Marcus Bales]

Was ever woman in this humour woo'd?
Was ever woman in this humour won?
I'll have her; but I will not keep her long.
What! I, that kill'd her husband and his father,
To take her in her heart's extremest hate,
With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,
The bleeding witness of her hatred by;
Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,
And I nothing to back my suit at all,
But the plain devil and dissembling looks,
And yet to win her, all the world to nothing!
Ha!

-- Shakespeare, Richard III I.ii

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

My only love sprung from my only hate!
Too early seen unknown, and known too late!
Prodigious birth of love it is to me
That I must love a loathed enemy.

Shakesapeare: Romeo and Juliet

[Marcus Bales]

Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look,
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.

Shakespeare -- Julius Caesar

[zero]

cowboy: well, just stop for a little second and think about it. will ya do that for me?

adam kesher: [sarcastic tone] okay, i'm thinking.

cowboy: no, you're not thinkin'. you're too busy being a smart aleck to be thinkin'. now i want ya to think and stop bein' a smart aleck. can ya try that for me? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GekiIMh4ZkM)

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

But we have doubt,” said Isabel. “Thinking is doubting. It amounts to the same thing.

Alexander McCall Smith: Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

[Marcus Bales]

Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words. Dorothy Parker

[zero]

wit. the salt with which the american humorist spoils his intellectual cookery by leaving it out.

- ambrose bierce

[12"razormix]

a person unlearns arrogance when he knows he is always among worthy human beings; being alone fosters presumption.

friedrich nietzsche

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

If I only had a little humility I would be perfect.

Ted Turner

[12"razormix]

and i'll pull your crooked teeth
you'll be perfect just like me

billy corgan

[zero]

why can't i be you?

- robert smith

[12"razormix]

you're venus as a boy

[zero]

nothing stands in your way
when youre a boy

-db

[Anna]

One of the rules of Brienne school was that each pupil should know
something about agriculture. To illustrate this study, each one of the
one hundred and fifty boys had a little garden-spot set aside for him to
cultivate and keep in order.

Some of the boys did this from choice, and because they loved to watch
things grow; but many of them were careless, and had no love for fruit
or flowers; so while some of the garden-plots were well kept, others
were neglected.

Napoleon was glad of this garden-plot, for it gave him something which
he could call his own. He cared for it faithfully; but he wished to make
it even more secluded. He remembered his dear grotto at Ajaccio, and
studied over a plan to make his garden-plot just such a real retreat.
But it was not large enough for this. He looked about him. The boys to
whom belonged the garden-plots on either side of him were careless and
neglectful. Their gardens received no attention; they were overgrown
with weeds; their hedges were full of gaps and holes.

"I will take them," said Napoleon; "what one cannot care for, another
must."

[Marcus Bales]

Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, "Some gardener must tend this plot." The other disagrees, "There is no gardener." So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. "But perhaps he is an invisible gardener." So they set up a barbed-wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds. (For they remember how H. G. Well's The Invisible Man could be both smelt and touched though he could not be seen.) But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. "But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible, to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves." At last the Sceptic despairs, "But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?"

--Antony Flew

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

”We’re Prisoners of War,” Chacko said. “Our dreams have been doctored. We belong nowhere. We sail unanchored on troubled seas. We may never be allowed ashore. Our sorrows will never be sad enough. Our joys never happy enough. Our dreams never big enough. Our lives never important enough. To matter.”
Then, to give Estha and Rahel a sense of historical perspective (though perspective was something, which, in the weeks to follow, Chacko himself would sorely lack), he told them about the Earth Woman. He made them imagine that the earth – four thousand six hundred million years old – was a forty-six-year-old woman – as old, say, as Aleyamma Teacher, who gave them Malayalam lessons. It had taken the whole of the Earth Woman’s life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans part. For the mountains to rise. The Earth Woman was eleven years old, Chacko said, when the first single-celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty-five – just eight months ago – when dinosaurs roamed the earth.
“The whole of human civilisation as we know it,” Chacko told the twins, “began only two hours ago in the Earth Woman’s life. As long as it takes us to drive from Ayemenem to Cochin.”
It was an awe-inspiring and humbling thought, Chacko said (Humbling was a nice word, Rahel thought. Humbling along without a care in the world), that the whole contemporary history, the World Wars, the War of Dreams, the Man on the Moon, science, literature, philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge – was no more than a blink of the Earth Woman’s eye.
“And we, my dears, everything we are and ever will be – are just a twinkle in her eye,” Chacko said grandly, lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling.
When he was in this sort of mood, Chacko used his Reading Aloud voice. His room had a church-feeling. He didn’t care whether anyone was listening to him or not. And if they were, he didn’t care, whether or not they had understood what he was saying. Ammu called them his Oxford Moods.
Later, in the light of all that happened, twinkle seemed the completely wrong word to describe the expression in the Earth Woman’s eye. Twinkle was a word with crinkled, happy edges.
...
While other children of their age learned other things, Estha and Rahel learned how history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws. They heard its sickening thud. They smelled its smell and never forgot it.
History’s smell.
Like old roses on a breeze.
It would lurk for ever in ordinary things. In coat-hangers. Tomatoes. In the tar on the roads. In certain colours. In the plates at a restaurant. In the absence of words. At the emptiness in eyes.
They would grow up grappling with ways of living with what happened. They would try to tell themselves that in terms of geological time it was an insignificant event. Just a blink of the Earth Woman’s eye. That Worse Things had happened. That Worse Things kept happening. But they would find no comfort in the thought.

Arundhati Roy: The God of Small Things

[12"razormix]

i have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

umberto eco

[zero]

cinema verite is the accountant's truth, as i keep saying. i have insulted many with that, but i've always been after what i call an 'ecstatic truth' — an ecstasy of truth... facts do not create truth. facts create norms, but they do not create an illumination.

- werner herzog

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

‘Look,’ she had said during one of their little chats, ‘ it’s a court of evidence, not truth. We have to forget about the truth, for truth’s sake. The truth is out of reach. And we shouldn’t pretend when we stand up in court that the truth is what we care about. We don’t. We care about what our client says is the truth. I can live with that. It’s the only way to take innocence seriously when all evidence points the other way. The truth? What’s that? It’s something the jury decided after I sat down.’

William Brodrick: the gardens of the dead

[zero]

LAWYER: mr. hill, this bass-fishing defence isn't going to cut it. hmm. were you abused as a child?
HANK: what? no!
LAWYER: are you sure? juries eat that up.
HANK: maybe i ought to tie that long hair on your head to the short hair on your ass and kick you down the street! i told you, i am not a doper!

[Anna]

Karen Crowder: You don't want the money?
Michael Clayton: Keep the money. You'll need it.

Don Jefferies: Is this fellow bothering you?

Michael Clayton: Am I bothering you?

Don Jefferies: Karen, I've got a board waiting in there. What the hell's going on? Who are you?

Michael Clayton: I'm Shiva, the God of death.

[T.I.P.]

"You're Hell's Angels, then ?" asked Big Ted, sarcastically. If there's one thing real Hell's Angels can't abide, it's weekend bikers.

The four strangers nodded.

"What chapter are you from, then?"

The Tall Stranger looked at Big Ted. Then he stood up. It was a complicated motion; if the shores of the seas of night had deck chairs, they'd open up something like that.
He seemed to be unfolding himself forever.
He wore a dark helmet, completely hiding his features. And it was made of that weird plastic, Big Ted noted. Like, you looked in it, and all you could see was your own face.
REVELATIONS, he said, CHAPTER SIX.



Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett - Good Omens

[Hyakujo's Fox]

Yes it's true, what they say, it's better the devil you know.

~ Kylie Minogue

[brightpearl]

God runs electromagnetics by wave theory on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the Devil runs them by quantum theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.
~Wm. Bragg, Sr.

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

God runs electromagnetics by wave theory on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the Devil runs them by quantum theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.
~Wm. Bragg, Sr.

Oh, so that's why my electrical generator doesn't work on Sundays!

[Anna]

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere. --Thomas Jefferson

[zero]

remember, remember, the 5th of november
the gunpowder treason and plot;
i see of no reason why gunpowder treason
should ever be forgot.

guy fawkes, guy fawkes,
'twas his intent.
to blow up the king and the parliament.
three score barrels of powder below.
poor old england to overthrow.


- children's rhyme recited each guy fawkes night, the 5th of november, when effigies of him are traditionally burned.

[Marcus Bales]

Treason never prospers --
What's the reason?
Why, when it prospers
None dare call it treason.

[Hyakujo's Fox]

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murder is less to fear.

-- Cicero Marcus Tullius

[Marcus Bales]

Truth made you a traitor as it often does in a time of scoundrels. - Lillian Hellman

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

Compromise is but the sacrifice of one right or good in the hope of retaining another-too often ending in the loss of both.

[Marcus Bales]

The pursuit, even of the best things, ought to be calm and tranquil. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero

[12"razormix]

waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. be one.

marcus aurelius

[zero]

one flash of light
but no smoking pistol

i never done good things
i never done bad things
i never did anything out of the blue

-db

[12"razormix]

blue, blue, electric blue
that's the colour of my room

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

There is more war fever, and troops are being entrained. There is a party of dervishes in their long pointed hats and voluminous robes, overblowing on their shawms and neys, crashing their cymbals and thrashing their drums, salivating, screaming, rolling their eyes. All around them the ordinary folk are falling into the contagious hysteria, crying out, swooning, in an ebullition of fanaticism.
Mustafa Kemal sees this and feels a bitter shame and embarrassment on behalf of his people. The blood rises to his cheeks, and anger to his throat. He divines clearly the advanced symptoms of spiritual and philosophical immaturity, he smells a repellent backwardness, a radical irrationality and credulity which is only just beneath the surface, and he is increasingly convinced that it is Islam that is holding his people back, locking them behind the door that separates the medieval from the modern age. He will never understand why it is that so many of them actually like to be there, locked behind the door, enwombed within their tiny horizon, perpetually consoled and reassured by their tendentious but unchanging certainties.

Louis de Bernières: Birds Without Wings

[Marcus Bales]

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war ...

from Howl, Allen Ginsberg

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

Having suddenly sighted, through the porthole of an interstellar vehicle,
that village brawl, known as the Battle of Nations,
that local flare-up of the hot blood of the human race;
political parties, protesters, screaming, flailing soap-box orators;
philosophies shining in every colour above the rutting rabble of devils;
taxes, like road-tax, smoke-tax, air-tax, sky-tax, wet-tax, dry-tax, to name but a few,
the impalings, hangings, drawings and quarterings, the stake,
well, everything that is covered and covered up by the term: East- Central Europe;
and realizing also that in this brothel, where beggars bargain for beggars,
we try to establish the golden section between prosperity and freedom
every time we see tomorrow's butterfly in the worm of today,
in other words, we even manage to love somehow our intolerable madness, -
the Angel of the Lord, an innocent country character from an open, transparent world,
could only gape and say this much: WELL, I NEVER!

Ottó Orbán: WITH ALIEN EYES
An outsider, if such could exist

[zero]

okay. if all those advanced ETs are out there, why haven’t they introduced themselves to us by now? the most popular answer is what i call the "benign anthropologist" conjecture. the aliens have not contacted us, this scenario assumes, because they don’t want to disturb the evolution of our pristine culture.

- lee gentry

[Hyakujo's Fox]

I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say? 'Hello, meat. How's it going?'

+ Terry Bisson

[Anna]

Good evening. Here is the news on Friday, the 27th of Geldof. Archaeologists near mount Sinai have discovered what is believed to be a missing page from the Bible. The page is currently being carbon dated in Bonn. If genuine it belongs at the beginning of the Bible and is believed to read "To my darling Candy. All characters portrayed within this book are fictitious and any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. - The new sensation sweeping the solar system is the total immersion video game, "Better Than Life." Using the new senso lock feedback technology, "Better Than Life" is able to detect all your desires and fantasies and then make them come true. So great is the appeal of "Better Than Life" when one store in New Tokyo ran out of stocks rubber nuclear weapons had to be deployed to disperse the crowd.

rd

[Hyakujo's Fox]

In the future, women will have breasts all over. In the future, it will be a relief to find a place without culture. In the future, plates of food will have names and titles. In the future, we will all drive standing up. In the future, love will be taught on television and by listening to pop songs.

# th #

[brightpearl]

The present is never our goal: the past and present are our means: the future alone is our goal. Thus, we never live but we hope to live; and always hoping to be happy, it is inevitable that we will never be so.

~Blaise Pascal

[zero]

time present and time past
are both perhaps present in time future,
and time future contained in time past.
if all time is eternally present
all time is unredeemable.
what might have been is an abstraction
remaining a perpetual possibility
only in a world of speculation.
what might have been and what has been
point to one end, which is always present.
footfalls echo in the memory
down the passage which we did not take
towards the door we never opened
into the rose-garden.

my words echo

thus,

in your mind.

- t.s. eliot from burnt norton

[Hyakujo's Fox]

The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as conceived by Ts'ui Pen. Unlike Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform and absolute time; he believed in an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times. That fabric of times that approach one another, fork, are snipped off, or are simply unknown for centuries, contains all possibilities. In most of those times, we do not exist; in some, you exist but I do not; in others, I do and you do not; in others still, we both do. In this one, which the favouring hand of chance has dealt me, you have come to my home; in another, when you come through my garden you find me dead; in another, I say these same words, but I am an error, a ghost.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

[zero]

does every new universe constructed have to be nice?

- philip k. dick from the three stigmata of palmer eldritch

[Anna]

http://img411.imageshack.us/img411/6937/stariconrbga0.gif (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M)

[12"razormix]

you must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.

friedrich nietzsche

[Stephi_B]

Chaos is the score upon which reality is written.

Henry Miller

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

Ponder Stibbons was one of those unfortunate people cursed with the belief that if only he found out enough things about the universe it would all, somehow make sense.

Terry Pratchett: The Last Continent

[Marcus Bales]

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out,
which is the exact opposite. -Bertrand Russell

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

“There are days when I get stuck with the crossword. I don’t go knocking my brains out. I just put it to one side and pick it up again later. And often I find that one or two answers come to me straight away. Thing is,” now he turned towards her, “you fix your mind on a certain track, until eventually you can’t see all the alternatives.

Ian Rankin: The Falls

[Anna]

“Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.”

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

The night sky was still light, a glow to the west, and it was warm. Many waters cannot quench love: the anthem’s setting remained in her ears, repeating itself; a tune so powerful that it might gird one against the disappointments of life, rather than make one aware that our attempts to subdue the pain of unrequited love – of impossible love, of love that we are best to put away and not to think about – tended not to work, and only made the wounds of love more painful.

Alexander McCall Smith: Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

[12"razormix]

love does not cause suffering: what causes it is the sense of ownership, which is love's opposite.

antoine de saint-exupery

[zero]

PEGGY: don't tell me you were jealous?
HANK: no! i was just mad that you were spending all your time with that guy, and i wanted you to spend it with me! jealousy had nothing to do with it!

[trisherina]

It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

[Stephi_B]

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.

Anaïs Nin

[zero]

while the leg room is constantly changing, the width of seats have not changed. only our phat arses have gotten wider. even worse than the phat arse is the upper body width of some of these guys!

- sacken@someforum

[12"razormix]

you don't expect me to fall for that, do you?

a.

[zero]

some estimates are very carefully done, others don't involve much more than wetting a finger and putting it in the air.

- marcus morton

[T.I.P.]

Golf is a game in which you yell 'fore', shoot six and write down five.

Paul Harvey

[brightpearl]

“I wish I could drink like a lady;
I can take one or two at the most --
Three and I'm under the table,
Four and I'm under the host.”

~Dorothy Parker

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else.

James Thurber

[Stephi_B]

We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!

Douglas Adams

[12"razormix]

a man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

ludwig wittgenstein

[Anna]

ñ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TLWZsL4-3c)


"I notice," said the duck, "that you only talk with one of your mouths. Can't the other head talk as well?"

"Oh, yes," said the pushmi-pullyu. "But I keep the other mouth for eating--mostly. In that way I can talk while I am eating without being rude. Our people have always been very polite."

[zero]

gilbert: ellen, could you not talk with your mouth full?

ellen: excuse me?

gilbert: you're making me sick. i'm gonna throw up.


- from what's eating gilbert grape

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.

Lewis Carroll

[zero]

i write because it's simply an interesting thing to do...i have no social purpose, no moral message; i've no general ideas to exploit, i just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.

- vladimir nabokov

[12"razormix]

that pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating and the most intense, is derived, i maintain, from the contemplation of the beautiful.

edgar allan poe

[zero]

i see it,
discreet in the alphabet,
like a wish

i pray it
into the night
til its letters are light.

- c a. duffy

[12"razormix]

( i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses )

ee cummings

[Anna]

"and all my instincts, they return
and the grand facade, so soon will burn
without a noise, without my pride
I reach out from the inside"
è¥é§ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqhNVboQmTo)

[brightpearl]

I don't agonize over decisions as much these days. The criteria of what's important to me is clear. The insecurity that you feel, and the paranoia that you feel, have been around for a long time..
You know it's a liar because it's been lying to you all along..
every time you start something new.

~John Cusack

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

Every decision is liberating, even if it leads to disaster. Otherwise, why do so many people walk upright and with open eyes into their misfortune?

Elias Canetti

[T.I.P.]

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

Wm. Henry Davies.

[zero]

the last best hope of earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we can do is stare at a flickering cathode-ray tube as ollie ''answers'' questions on tv while the press, resolutely irrelevant as ever, asks politicians if they have committed adultery. from v-j day 1945 to this has been, my fellow countrymen, a perfect nightmare.

- gore vidal

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.

[12"razormix]

i will sit right down, waiting for the gift of sound and vision
and i will sing, waiting for the gift of sound and vision
drifting into my solitude, over my head

db

[zero]

you saw me coming round
east by the moon
you saw me coming
but can you feel?

it's alright

your blue room

- u2

[Anna]

“…the room was dimly lit by the moon as it came in through the open window, the light danced on the wall as a soft breeze played with the curtains. Something fell, and then a shadow moved quickly across the room, “Who’s there?” he called. There was no answer. ”Who’s there?””

[lukkucairi]

Moon Sammy washes in the sink
below the sink there is a drain
the drain goes straight into the sea
the sink itself is porcelain

Obsess yourself with causality. The information you hear is a loophole,
technicality. Behind every object is a mathematic; an obscure substance
infused with a kinetic force, energy, an obscure conscience shoots a gun at
the feet the world dances.

MD

[brightpearl]

My Zen teacher told me to do the opposite of everything he said.
So I didn't.

~(Oh, how I wish I could remember the source..!)

[Marcus Bales]

Many a person fails as an original thinker because their memory is too good. -- Friedrich Nietzsche

[Stephi_B]

Only he is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.

Anton Chekhov

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.

Søren Kierkegaard

[Stephi_B]

I see my path, but I don't know where it leads. Not knowing where I'm going is what inspires me to travel it.

Rosalia de Castro

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

The unknown always seems sublime.

Tacitus

[T.I.P.]

Existence precedes essence.

Jean-Paul Sartre

[Anna]

the essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude -fn

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness and more of Sin
And Horror the Soul of the Plot.


Edgar Allan Poe

[brightpearl]

"Now you understand the Oriental passion for tea," said Japhy. "Remember that book I told you about; the first sip is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy."

~Jack Kerouac
Dharma Bums

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

By three methods we may learn wisdom: first, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is the most bitter.

Confucius

[zero]

BOOMHAUER: yeah, man, them chinese, man, you can't understand a dang-ol' word they say, man, just try, dang ol' whole upside-down 'nwhatnot.

[Anna]

"All right, brain. You don't like me and I don't like you, but let's just do this and I can get back to killing you with beer." -hs

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

In England once there lived a big
And wonderfully clever pig.
To everybody it was plain
That Piggy had a massive brain.
He worked out sums inside his head,
There was no book he hadn't read,
He knew what made an airplane fly,
He knew how engines worked and why.
He knew all this, but in the end
One question drove him round the bend:
He simply couldn't puzzle out
What LIFE was really all about.

Roald Dahl

[12"razormix]

when men are most sure and arrogant they are commonly most mistaken, giving views to passion without that proper deliberation which alone can secure them from the grossest absurdities.

david hume

[zero]

i feel cutler will be the best of the three. he has that cocky confidence, the fire burning in his belly. he has the stronger arm, he has mobility, he's fearless to make the big play, and he has a whatever-it-takes-type attitude.

- tony softli

[12"razormix]

pictured above is the resulting hole in the ceiling, while the inset image shows the wall dent and the meteorite itself. although the vast majority of meteors is much smaller and burn up in the earth's atmosphere, the average homeowner should expect to repair direct meteor damage every hundred million years.

ivan navarro

[Anna]

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'" -ia

[trisherina]

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

-- Einstein

[zero]

einstein was a giant. his head was in the clouds, but his feet were on the ground. those of us who are not so tall have to choose!

- richard p. feynman

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

I have a friend who is a giant,
And he lives where the tall weeds grow.
He’s high as a mountain and wide as a barn,
And I only come up to his toe, you know,
I only come up to his toe.

When the daylight grows dim I talk with him
Way down in the marshy sands,
And his ear is too far way to hear
But still he understands, he ‘stands,
I know he understands

For we have a code called the “scratch‑tap code,”
And here is what we do -
I scratch his toe ... once means, “Hello”
And twice means, “How are you?”
Three means, “Does it look like rain?”
Four times means, “Don’t cry.”
Five times means, “I’ll scratch you a joke.”
And six times means, “Goodbye,” “Goodbye,”
Six times means, “Goodbye.”

And he answers me by tapping his toe
Once means, “Hello, friend.”
Two taps means, “It’s very nice to feel your scratch again.”
Three taps means, “It’s lonely here
With my head in the top of the sky.”
Four taps means, “Today an eagle smiled as she flew by.”
Five taps means, “Oops, I just bumped my head against the moon.”
Six means, “Sigh” and seven means, “Bye”
And eight means, “Come back soon, soon, soon,”
Eight means, “Come back soon.’’

And then I scratch a thousand times,
And he taps with a bappity‑bimm,
And he laughs so hard he shakes the sky
That means I’m tickling him!

Shel Silverstein: Me and My Giant

[brightpearl]

Attending there let us absorb the cultures of nations
And dissolve into our judgement all their codes.
Then, being clogged, with a natural hesitation
(People are continually asking one the way out),
Let us stand here and admit that we have no road.

~William Empson

[zero]

but then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and i shambled after as i've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'awww!'"

- jack kerouac

[brightpearl]

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

~Dylan Thomas

[Marcus Bales]

Well, I’ve seen all there is to see
And I’ve heard all they have to say
I’ve done everything I wanted to do --
Yep, I’ve done that, too.

And it ain’t that pretty at all
Ain’t that pretty at all
So I’m gonna hurl myself against the wall
Cause I’d rather feel bad than not feel anything at all

-- Warren Zevon

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

I don't believe that life is supposed to make you feel good, or make you feel miserable either. Life is just supposed to make you feel.

Gloria Naylor

[Stephi_B]

Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music.

Angela Monet

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

The world was moving around her. She blinked. The drums in her head were like thunder now, and there was one beat as deep as oceans. Miss Treason was forgotten. So was the strange, mysterious crowd. Now there was only the dance itself.

It twisted in the air like a living thing. But there was a space in it, moving around. It was where she should be, she knew it. Miss Treason had said no, but that had been a long time ago and how could Miss Treason understand? What could she know? When did she last dance? The dance was in Tiffany’s bones now, calling to her. Six dancers were not enough!

She ran forward and jumped into the dance.

The eyes of the dancing men glared at her as she skipped and danced between them, always being where they weren’t. The drums had her feet, and they went where the beat sent them.

And then……there was someone else there.

It was like the feeling of someone behind her—but it was also the feeling of someone in front of her, and beside her, and above her, and below her, all at once.

Terry Pratchett: Wintersmith

[zero]

an escalator can never break: it can only become stairs. you would never see an escalator temporarily out of order sign, just escalator temporarily stairs - sorry for the convenience.

- mitch hedberg

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

Don't Panic.

Douglas Adams

[Anna]

"Jesus wept."
Gospel of John, chapter 11, verse 35.

[Marcus Bales]

Pretty soon Tom says:
Ready?
Yes, I says.
All right--bring it out.
My plan is this, I says. We can easy find out if it’s Jim in there. Then get up my canoe tomorrow night, and fetch my raft over from the island. Then the first dark night that comes steal the key out of the old man’s britches after he goes to bed, and shove off down the river on the raft with Jim, hiding daytimes and running nights, the way me and Jim used to do before. Wouldn’t that plan work?
Why, cert’nly it would work, like rats a-fighting. But it’s too blame simple; there ain’t nothing to it. What’s the good of a plan that ain’t no more trouble than that? It’s as mild as goosemilk. Why, Huck, it wouldn’t make no more talk than breaking into a soap factory.
I never said nothing, because I warn’t expecting nothing different; but I knowed mighty well that whenever he got his plan ready it wouldn’t have none of them objections to it.
And it didn’t. He told me what it was, and I see in a minute it was worth fifteen on mine for style, and would make Jim just as free a man as mine would, and maybe get us killed besides. So I was satisfied, and said we would waltz in on it. I needn’t say what it was here, because I knowed it wouldn’t stay the way it was. I knowed he would be changing it around every which way as we went along.

– Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn

[12"razormix]

tom petty says:

and all around your island
there's a barricade
it keeps out the danger
it holds in the pain
sometimes you're happy
sometimes you cry
half of me is ocean
half of me is sky

[Marcus Bales]

Don't talk of love,
Cause Ive heard the words before;
It's sleeping in my memory.
I wont disturb the slumber of feelings that have died.
If I never loved I never would have cried.
I am a rock,
I am an island.

--Paul Simon

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

No pain. no gain.

[Marcus Bales]

No pain, no pain.

[12"razormix]

there is something more terrible than a hell of suffering: a hell of boredom.

victor hugo

[zero]

heaven is a place where nothing ever happens
heaven is a place where nothing ever happens
when this kiss is over it will start again
it will not be any different it will be exactly the same
its hard to imagine that nothing at all
could be so exciting could be so much fun
heaven is a place where nothing every happens
heaven is a place where nothing every happens

-db

[12"razormix]

i hear footsteps, it seems like i’ve been through this before
well we loved you then, i guess we always will
we love you still from here
birds of a feather always stay together
and never separate, no fear

sm

[zero]

the evening advanced. the shadows lengthened. the waters of the lake grew pitchy black. the gliding of the ghostly swans became rare and more rare.

wilkie collins

[12"razormix]

and thou, a ghost amid the entombing trees
didst glide away. only thine eyes remained
they would not go - they never yet have gone
lighting my lonely pathway home that night
they have not left me ( as my hopes have ) since
they follow me - they lead me through the years

ea poe

[Marcus Bales]

Neutral Tones
Thomas Hardy

We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;
They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles of years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro
On which lost the more by our love.

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing...

Since then keen lessons that love deceives
And wrings with wrong have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

But it was more than a question of hair and skin and eyes, because what one saw was more than just her beauty. You see, my father, drunkard though he was, was right when he said that she reminded you of death. When you looked at Philotei, you were reminded of a terrible truth, which is that everything decays away and is lost. Beauty is precious, you see, and the more beautiful something is, the more precious it is; and the more precious something is, the more it hurts us that it will fade away; and the more we are hurt by beauty, the more we love the world; and the more we love it, the more we are saddened that it is like finely powdered salt that runs away through the fingers, or is puffed away by the wind, or is washed away by the rain. You see, I am ugly. If I had died in my youth no one would have said, “Look how much poorer is the world”, but to be entranced by Philotei was to receive a lesson in fate.

Louis de Bernières: Birds Without Wings

[Anna]

ever drifting down the stream -- lingering in the golden gleam -- life what is it but a dream? -lc

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

It cannot be seen, cannot be felt
Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt.
It lies behind stars and under hills,
And empty holes it fills.
It comes first and follows after,
Ends life, kills laughter.


I know it from Tolkien's Hobbit, but it's probably of folk origin.

[12"razormix]

to live happily is an inward power of the soul.

marcus aurelius

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.

Quentin Crisp

[zero]

we are like the spider. we weave our life and then move along in it. we are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. this is true for the entire universe.

- da (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a86oKl34ZQ&feature=related)vid lynch (from the upanishads)

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

If you are a dreamer, come in,
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer...
If you're a pretender, come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!

Shel Silverstein: Invitation

[Marcus Bales]

Listen to what they did
James Fenton

Don't listen to what they said
What was written in blood
Had been set up in lead

Lead tears the heart
Lead tears the brain
What was written in blood
Has been set up again

The heart is a drum
The heart is a snare
The snare is in the blood
The blood is in the air

Listen to what they did
Listen to what is to come
Listen to the blood
Listen to the drum.

[zero]

one of man’s greatest obstacles is to learn to sit quietly in his room.


- blaise pascal

[brightpearl]

Yi with his archer's skill,
Could hit a target at a hundred paces.
But when arrowpoints meet head on,
What has this to do with the power of skill?
When the wooden man begins to sing,
The stone woman gets up to dance...

~Master Tozan

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.

Charles Michael "Chuck" Palahniuk

[Anna]

"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales" -æ (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Einstein)

[zero]

on my way up north
up on the ventura
i pulled back the hood
and i was talking to you
and i knew then it would be
a life long thing
but i didn't know that we
we could break a silver lining

and i'm so sad
like a good book
i can't put this day back
a sorta fairytale
with you

- tori amos