We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it. –Tennessee Williams, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me. –Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. –Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Dragon-Princess”
There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in. –Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”
... those who have been betrayed
come back like pilgrims to this moment
when we did not yield
when we steadfastly refused
to call the darkness poetry
–Leonard Cohen, “Welcome to These Lines”
Because your sorrow will not return to its birthplace. You cannot breathe.
Because you believe you were not meant to be so far away. You cannot breathe.
Because this is the valley of the shadow of death. You cannot breathe. Because
you cannot be here.
Because you do not know what is coming. You cannot
breathe. Because this world is yours and it is not yours. You cannot breathe.
–Leonard Cohen, “The Asthmatic”
Seize the round world and stop it from struggling and plant your mouth in the burnt skin. I am your dead voice. –Leonard Cohen, “Hurry to Your Dinner”
... our personalities are inextricably linked to the places that surround us. Every time we hang a poster on a wall or toss a coffee cup in the trash or download another album from iTunes, we leave clues about who we are. We broadcast our traits and values, our goals and identities for people to see and perhaps to judge. And although we may attempt to arrange our stuff to outfox others, our true personalities inevitably leak out, especially under the scrutiny of sharp-eyed sleuths. –Sam Gosling, Snoop: What Your Stuff Says about You
More obscene than anything is inertia. More blasphemous than the bloodiest oath is paralysis. –Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
To be honest, I had this image of myself: I was the tree that a drunk driver slides off the road into. The tree doesn’t move. It doesn’t do anything except stand there. It kills the person just by standing there. That would be me. I’ve got my attitude: lethal neutrality and immobility. –Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love
For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grâce, it needs to be blown to smithereens. Not one of us is intact, and yet we have in us all the continents and the seas between the continents and the birds of the air. We are going to put it down—the evolution of this world which has died but which has not been buried. –Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
To different minds the same world is a hell, and a heaven. –Ralph Waldo Emerson, journal, December 20, 1822
All sins are attempts to fill voids. –Simone Weil, La Pesanteur et la Grâce
There is more real pleasure to be gotten out of a malicious act, where your heart is in it, than out of thirty acts of a nobler sort. –Mark Twain, Mark Twain in Eruption
I suppose watching one’s mother and brother being swept to oblivion by a freak wave adds a sobering note to any nine-year-old’s life. But I am certain that even before that memorable incident I could never really suppress bleak thoughts, especially the most inopportune ones, a habit that has persisted. For instance: called upon to view a friend’s newborn baby, the precious bundle from which protrude adorable bits of infant anatomy, I always find myself wondering (even as my voice supplies the requisite pleasantries) whether it will grow up to be force-fed human excrement and drowned in a barracks latrine, as uncounted Russian Jews were in the Second World War. Or else is it destined to die of a drug overdose at seventeen, choke to death in a restaurant in its thirties, or fall victim to a hit-and-run driver while walking the dog? In short, there is nothing like the sight of a new life to make me wonder how it will end. This must be one of those yardsticks of a person’s basic character, like the one that supposedly distinguishes optimists from pessimists (is the glass half full or half empty?). Is this baby alive or merely laggard in its dying? It does add a dimension of pity to what is otherwise a flat and goofy spectacle of inapprehensive love. And I am powerless to stop it. –James Hamilton-Paterson, Amazing Disgrace
Being in labor all by herself—no husband around, no friend to hold her hand—was about the worst thing she could imagine. Well, that and having her midriff appear on one of those “Obesity: A National Epidemic” news reports. –Jennifer Weiner, Little Earthquakes
How do people, like, not curse? How is it possible? There are all these gaps in speech where you just have to put a “fuck.” I’ll tell you who the most admirable people in the world are: newscasters. If that was me, I’d be like, “And the motherfuckers flew the fucking plane right into the Twin Towers.” How could you not, if you’re a human being? Maybe they’re not so admirable. Maybe they’re robot zombies. –Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down
In certain trying circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer. –Mark Twain, quoted in Albert B. Paine’s Mark Twain: A Biography
Why do we call bodies temples? They’re a mess. My body was just a disaster. Everything was wrong, and new wrongs sprung up all the time: stray hairs, warts, broken veins, all signs, surely, that something was very screwed up, that I was sick, and worse than that, too short to model. –Jennifer Traig, Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood
Like many girls who don’t get asked out in high school, I spent my teenage years believing I was a displaced European. It was so obvious I’d been born in the wrong country, what with my having such sophisticated Continental sensibilities and all. As soon as I was old enough, I told myself and anyone who would listen, I was moving to a country where my unconventional looks, difficult charms, and erratic hygiene would be appreciated. –ditto
If I don’t get AIDS I’ll turn into a serial killer. The first in Iceland. A sure way to get on the front pages of the evening paper. Except I’d insist on not having my face scrambled in the picture. But then of course I’d have to move out of home. Our garden isn’t big enough for a mass grave. –Hallgrímur Helgason, 101 Reykjavík
Some mistakes are both simple and huge. The worst mistakes I’ve made have been the ones directed by sweet-natured hopefulness. –Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love
My inner life lacks dignity. There’s nothing I can do about that. –ditto
Find that flame, that existence,
That Wonderful Man
Who can burn beneath the water.
No other kind of light
Will cook the food you
Need.
–Hafiz, “No Other Kind of Light”
A ship in a harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for. –John A. Shedd, Salt from My Attic
How I loathe things Western, this petty patriarchal mendacity, this vapid sex-sentimentality, this whole driveling Christian shit. –Christer Kihlman, The Blue Mother
The future is written with a pitchfork on the water. –Debra Dean, The Madonnas of Leningrad
Each day, the world is made fresh again, holy, and she takes it in, in all its raw intensity, like a young child. She feels something bloom in her chest—joy or grief, eventually they are inseparable. The world is so acutely beautiful, for all its horrors, that she will be sorry to leave it. –ditto
It’s true: Everyone needs a reason to stay alive—someone who justifies your existence. Someone who loves you. Not beyond all reason. Just loves you. Even just shows an interest. Even someone who doesn’t exist, or isn’t yours. No, no! They don’t even have to love you! They just have to be there to love! Target for your arrows. Magnetic Pole to drag on your compass needle and stop it spinning and spinning and tell you where you’re heading and ... Someone to soak up all the yearning. That’s what I think. –Geraldine McCaughrean, The White Darkness
The trees with most leaves will not necessarily produce juicy fruit. –Brazilian proverb
Pray that you will never have to bear all that you are able to endure. –Jewish proverb
... you never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from. –Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men
I thought I understood his kind: the petty bureaucrats of tyranny, men who relish the carefully measured meed of power permitted to them, who need to walk in the aura of manufactured fear, to know that the fear precedes them as they enter a room and will linger like a smell after they have left, but who have neither the sadism nor the courage for the ultimate cruelty. But they need their part of the action. It isn’t sufficient for them, as it is for most of us, to stand a little way off to watch the crosses on the hill. –PD James, The Children of Men
… everything is covered with a mortal taste
of retreat and dampness and injury.
–Pablo Neruda, “The Destroyed Street”
Today you’ll emerge from the coal and the dew.
Today you’ll come to shake the doors
with bruised hands, with bits
of surviving soul, with clusters
of expressions that death did not extinguish,
with intractable tools
hidden beneath your tatters.
–Pablo Neruda, “Insurgent America (1800)”
… and for me there’s no god but dark sand,
the interminable spine of stone and night,
the unsociable day
with an advent
of miserable clothes, of exterminated soul.
–Pablo Neruda, “Winter in the South, on Horseback”
My soul is an empty carousel at sunset. –Pablo Neruda, “My Soul”
Come with me to the offices, to the uncertain
smell of ministries, and tombs, and postage stamps.
Come with me to the white day that is dying
screaming like a murdered bride.
–Pablo Neruda, “Disaction”
You live like a god
somewhere behind the names
I have for you,
your body made of nets
my shadow’s tangled in …
–Leonard Cohen, “You Live Like a God”
The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. –Bertrand Russell, quoted in Laird Wilcox and John George’s Be Reasonable: Selected Quotations for Inquiring Minds
Don’t be confused by surfaces; in the depths everything becomes law. –Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, letter #4
If you don’t see the bottom, don’t wade. –Scottish proverb
Many demolitions are actually renovations. –Rumi, “Muhammad and the
Huge Eater”
But listen to me: for one moment,
quit being sad. Hear blessings
dropping their blossoms
around you.
–Rumi, “Burnt Kabob”
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
–Rumi, an untitled piece in Coleman Barks’s The Essential Rumi
I feel like the ground, astonished
at what the atmosphere has brought to it. What I know
is growing inside me. Rain makes
every molecule pregnant with a mystery.
–Rumi, “The Ground Cries Out”
Every object, every being,
is a jar full of delight.
Be a connoisseur,
and taste with caution.
–Rumi, “The Many Wines”
Any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It belongs to you. It’s yours to take, re-arrange, and re-use. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. –Banksy, Wall and Piece
Grotesque, bizarre, uncanny, étrange…some things just defy the tight, little categories into which we stuff our conceptual realities. And when they do, all hell breaks loose. Minds crack, institutions buckle. The power of grotesqueries and other irrational artifacts of the human world lies in their challenge to the collective moral order of what we consider to be “natural.” –MA Greenstein, in a 1996 issue of Dark’s Art Parlour
… when faced with an image that contradicts our sense of what is natural or what is morally “right,” we give into either psychic paranoia or desire. Some of us will be hijacked by our anxiety over negotiating the dark terrors prescribed by cultural consensus; others of us will enjoy the seduction of palpable uncertainty. –ditto
… maybe bad things happen because it’s the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look like. –Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes
To really know someone is to have loved and hated him in turn. –Marcel Jouhandeau, Défense de l’enfer
If you destroy a bridge, be sure you can swim. – Swahili proverb
Anyone who has obeyed nature by transmitting a piece of gossip experiences the explosive relief that accompanies the satisfying of a primary need. –Primo Levi, “About Gossip”
No matter how much we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition. –Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
In violence we forget who we are. –Mary McCarthy, On the Contrary
If a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live. –Martin Luther King, Jr., speech in Detroit, June 23, 1963
I’m not living with you. We occupy the same cage. –Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
The very idea of sending packed trains through the bowels of the earth, like turds through a vast, curving gut, appalled and frightened him ... there was something about the Tube that could turn him into a sad, screaming wreck. –Geoff Nicholson, Bleeding London
To know all is not to forgive all. It is to despise everybody. –Quentin Crisp, The Naked Civil Servant
Nothing seems expensive on credit. –Czech proverb
If things are getting easier, maybe you’re headed downhill. –Ghanaian proverb
A little axe can cut down a big tree. –Jamaican proverb
Accomplishment of purpose is better than making a profit. –Nigerois proverb
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. –Eleanor Roosevelt, This is My Story
It’s not that I have no shame. Rather, I’m exhausted with shame, slippery all over with its sticky albumen taint. It is not an emotion that leads anywhere. –Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin
How lucky we are, when we’re spared what we think we want! –ditto
We are accustomed to think that fate is fickle and we never have what we want. Actually, we all get what is ours—and that’s the most terrifying thing. –Andrei Bitov, Pushkin House
... everything passes, and we do eventually get out from under the things and people that have burdened us (more precisely, we outlive our memories of them)… –ditto
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. –Elie Wiesel, in the US News and World Report, October 27, 1986
A gay Vietnam veteran ... they gave me a medal for killing two men—and a discharge for loving one. –description on Leonard Matlovich’s tombstone, quoted in the Washington Post, April 22, 1988, and echoing the idiocy of the US military’s later “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy”
[Upon being challenged to use the word horticulture in a sentence:] You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think. –Dorothy Parker, in Robert E. Drennan’s The Algonquin Wits
… the thing is that when you are vulnerable everyone thinks they can help you, but when you show it as a sign of strength, they get intimidated and anxious and try and squash you back to where you were. And the thing is that as you grow up you have to leave people behind and move on and let go, and people are very frightened by that. –Princess Diana, as quoted in Piers Morgan’s The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade
We must be the change we wish to see in the world. –Mahatma Gandhi, quoted in the LA Times, July 30, 1989 (the Ghandi Institute for Nonviolence has verified that Gandhi was known to say this verse many times in his lifetime and believes it to be his original saying)
In spite of illness, in spite even of the arch-enemy sorrow, one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways. –Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance
I’m living so far beyond my means that we may almost be said to be living apart. –Hector Hugh Munro, The Unbearable Bassington
... please don’t let me stop thinking and start blindly frightenedly accepting! I want to taste and glory in each day, and never be afraid to experience pain, and never shut myself up in a numb core of nonfeeling, or stop questioning and criticizing life and take the easy way out. –Sylvia Plath, journal, January 10, 1953
Somewhere in her stomach was a knot of feeling that she could not allow herself to touch. She could skirt the edges of it, chart its size and location, feel it hard and heavy in her belly. But she could not touch it. When she probed the edges, she felt the cold sensation that comes with a great injury, like the chill that follows the cut of a knife, just before the pain hits. –Pat Murphy, The City, Not Long After
They told us you’ll conquer when you submit.
We’ve submitted and found ashes.
They told us you’ll conquer when you love.
We loved and found ashes.
They told us you’ll conquer when you abandon your life.
We abandoned our life and found ashes.
We found ashes. It remains to rediscover our
life, now that we’ve nothing left. I imagine that he who’ll rediscover life,
in spite of so much paper, so many emotions, so many debates, and so much teaching,
will be someone like us, only with a slightly tougher memory. We ourselves can’t
help still remembering what we’ve given. He’ll remember only what he’s gained
from each of his offerings. What can a flame remember? If it remembers a little
less than is necessary, it goes out; if it remembers a little more than is necessary,
it goes out. If only it could teach us, while it burns, to remember correctly.
I’ve come to an end: if only someone else could begin at the point where I’ve
ended. There are times when I have the impression that I’ve reached the limit,
that everything’s in its place, ready to sing together in harmony. The machine
on the point of starting. I can even imagine it in motion, alive, like something
unexpectedly new. But there’s still something: an infinitesimal obstacle, a
grain of sand, shrinking and shrinking yet unable to disappear completely. I
don’t know what I ought to say or what I ought to do. Sometimes that obstacle
seems to me like a teardrop wedged into some articulation of the orchestra,
keeping it silent until it’s been dissolved. And I have an unbearable feeling
that all the rest of my life won’t be sufficient to dissolve this drop within
my soul. And I’m haunted by the thought that, if they were to burn me alive,
this obstinate moment would be the last to surrender. –George Seferis, an untitled
piece in Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard’s George Seferis: Collected
Poems, dated June 5, 1932
… maybe luck wasn’t the sort of thing people could be said to possess at all: maybe there were currents of luck, good and bad, that ran through the world, and sometimes we found ourselves in one current, sometimes in the other, but the water itself was never truly a part of us, we were just trying to stay afloat in it. –Kevin Brockmeier, A Brief History of the Dead
Dreaming was easier than screaming, and screaming was easier than worrying, and worrying was easier than crying, which was what she knew she would be reduced to if she didn’t keep a hard eye on herself. –ditto
Sometimes he thought there must be something about him that attracted such people from an infinite distance. You know the way that certain wild animals will scout around for miles in search of the cleanest place to empty their bowels? Well, he was the cleanest place, and they were the wild animals. It was uncanny. In every railway concourse or shopping mall, he was always the guy trailing the long line of religious cultists behind him, a bright exploding flare of bald heads, orange robes, and ponytails. The freaks and the con artists, the drug addicts and schizophrenics: inevitably, no matter where he went, they seemed to zero right in on him. Even here in the City he could not seem to avoid them, whether it was the beggar with his patchy beard and his hard-luck stories or that nutcase with the bird fixation and the Jesus signs. –ditto [this cracks me up because this is exactly how it is for my friend Melissa and me!]
It isn’t important to come out on top. What matters is to be the one who comes out alive. –Bertolt Brecht, In the Jungle of Cities
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. –Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan
If any mention was made of homicide, madness, adultery, and intolerable tortures, we would let the church-bells ring louder, the church-organ swell its peal and drown the hideous sound. The sugar they raised was excellent: nobody tasted blood in it. –Ralph Waldo Emerson, Miscellanies (in a speech given on the anniversary of the emancipation of black citizens of the British West Indies)
I’ve got a lotta heart, Dad, and this heart might appear aimless and irresponsible but it’s not. It might be a partially destructive heart, but it’s a heart with gumption. It’s a heart with moxie. There is nothing to worry about. I’m not worried. –David Dornstein, in a 1984 letter to his father
He who has seen everything empty itself is close to knowing what everything is filled with. –Antonio Porchia
Being a somewhat dark person myself, I fell in love with the idea that what you look for your whole life will eventually eat you alive. –Laurie Anderson
You always become the thing you fight the most. –Carl Jung
I base most of my fashion taste on what doesn’t itch. –Gilda Radner
One thing the last couple of years has taught me is that there’s nothing you can’t fuck up if you try hard enough. –Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down
The world breaks everyone, and afterward many are strong at the broken places. –Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us. –Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays, “Character”
I shall be a dawn made of all the air I ever breathed. –Saint Geraud
What is to give light must endure burning. –Victor Frankel
I learned to trust my obsessions. It is surely a great calamity for a human being to have no obsessions. –Robert Bly
I refuse to give up my obsession. –Allen Ginsberg, “America”
The question is not what you look at but what you see. –Henry David Thoreau
Perfectionism is spelled PARALYSIS. –Winston Churchill
I am ashamed of my century for being so entertaining but I have to smile. –Frank O’Hara
But humor can’t go hand in hand with revolution. Humor means multiple viewpoints, which revisionists cannot afford. –Ned Rorem
A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it. –Rabindranath Tagore
Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit. –Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no muse. –Lewis Thomas
If you take a single atom and make it as large as Yankee Stadium, it would consist almost entirely of empty space. The center of the atom, the nucleus, would be smaller than a baseball sitting out in center field. The outer parts of the atom would be tiny gnats buzzing about at an altitude higher than any pop fly Babe Ruth ever hit. And between the baseball and the gnats? Nothingness. All empty. You are more emptiness than anything else. Indeed, if all the space were taken out of you, you would be a million times smaller than the smallest grain of sand. –Brian Swimme
... lately I’m tired of how the rest of the world doesn’t live in my head and already know the inside jokes that have worked their way into my regular conversation rotation. ... So from now on, I’m just saying fuck it and using all these personal phrases without any pauses or sidenotes, and if people cannot understand what I’m talking about, they can either try to figure it out on their own like I did and keep up with the flow, or think I’m a doddering old man trapped in young woman’s body, which I probably am. –Sarah Brown
… it suddenly occurred to me that there would always be road construction—not always on this particular road, but somewhere. There will never be a point in my lifetime when all the highways are fixed. It’s theoretically plausible that my closest friend might someday abandon me for no reason whatsoever, but it’s completely impossible to envision a day where I could drive from New York to California without hitting roadwork somewhere along the way. It will always exist, and there’s nothing I can do about it. And for the first time, that reality made me sad. –Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs
When Carl Jung introduced the concept of the “collective unconscious,” he was trying to explain why all humans are inherently scared of things like darkness and vampires—but net porn is the collective conscious. It’s where we all see the things people would never admit to wanting. –ditto
Psychologically, the Internet is very Marxist: Everyone with a modem has access to the same information, so we all get jammed into a technological middle class. You don’t need to be Lenny Kravitz to know what Lisa Bonet looks like when she steps out of the shower. You don’t even need to wear hemp pants. All you need is a modem and a phone jack. –ditto
Console yourself with the fact that the heart of the world, its core, speaks straight to us, not via wires. –Mati Unt, Things in the Night
Every man’s armor is borrowed, and beneath it, he’s naked and shivering and hoping you won’t see. –Norah Vincent
I want to be bruised by God.
I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out.
I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.
I want to be entered and picked clean.
–Charles Wright, “Clear Night”
It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong. –Voltaire
You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life. –Winston Churchill
… any embarrassment to people in authority gives me great pleasure. –Sergei Dovlatov, The Compromise
But places that seep into our hearts tend to make permanent homes there ... For chronic movers like me, and for the hectic lives that we all seem to live, there’s no balm quite like that of returning to the same physical spot again and again while the world rushes by at breakneck speed. These places become touchstones, geographic constants to repair to year after year, and sanctuaries to which to retreat when not much else makes sense. TS Eliot referred to such places as “the still point of the turning world,” the deeply meditative spots “where past and future are gathered,” and where our lives seem most clear. For me the clarity of geographic touchstones has provided joy, solace, a much needed wake-up call, hope in times of despair, lucidity in times of confusion, an overbearing need to tell my barely cognitive two-year-old about my childhood, and even a sweet form of regret. These touchstones are sentimental, sure, but in the best possible sense. They are landscapes we have soaked in memory; they are walk-through scrapbooks of our lives. –Elizabeth Weil, “Paradises Found”
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
–T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, “Little Gidding”
Ninety percent of everything is crap. –Theodore Sturgeon, in Robert Forward and Joel Davis’s Mirror Matter
We must change in order to survive. –Pearl Bailey, Hurry Up, America, and Spit
This world we live in is but thickened light. –Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lectures and Biographical Sketches
My experience has been good with AOL. I always meet somebody interesting that I wouldn’t normally meet in my social circle. Especially considering that my social circle consists almost entirely of faces on a television screen. –Augusten Burroughs, Magical Thinking
I never watch CNN. I hate news and information and anything that threatens to puncture the bubble of oblivion in which I live. –ditto
Nothing, in my opinion, sets the odious selfishness of mankind in such a repulsively vivid light, as the treatment, in all cases of society, which the Single people receive at the hands of the Married people. When you have once shown yourself too considerate and self-denying to add a family of your own to an already overcrowded population, you are vindictively marked out, by your married friends, who have no similar consideration and no similar self-denial, as the recipient of half their conjugal troubles, and the born friend of all their children. Husbands and wives talk of the cares of matrimony; and bachelors and spinsters bear them. –Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
People think you’re dangerous when you’re chaotic. I feel dangerous now that I’m focused. –Angelina Jolie
When I envision a perfect summer’s day, however, I can think of no better place to spend it than in a refreshing, air-conditioned chamber, preferably with drawn shades, a frosty cocktail and/or iced espresso beverage, and a TV tuned to the Cartoon Network, in front of which I will be arranged horizontally. Place me out of doors on one of those blistering afternoons when the mercury climbs above 60 degrees, and I become foul-tempered and glum. But point me in the direction of an air conditioner, and my will to live soon returns. Air conditioning has that power for me. When I close my windows and shut my door, its hypnotic whir transforms my office into a dominion of worker productivity. –Dan Zevin, The Day I Turned Uncool: Confessions of a Reluctant Grown-Up
You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place, like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again. –Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran
Never be afraid to sit awhile and think. –Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
–Lucille Clifton, “song at midnight”
Men should not care too much for good looks; neglect is becoming. –Ovid, Ars amatoria
But close your eyes and it is sunset
At the edge of the world. It is the language
Of dolphins, the growth of tree-roots,
The heart-beat slowing down.
–John Fuller, “Concerto for Double Bass”
Passion is what we are most deeply curious about, most hungry for, will most hate to lose in life. It is the most desperate wish we need to yell down the well of our lives. It is whatever we pursue merely for its own sake, what we study when there are no tests to take, what we create though no one may ever see it. It makes us forget that the sun rose and set, that we have bodily functions and personal relations that could use a little tending. It is what we’d do if we weren’t worried about consequences, about money, about making anybody happy but ourselves. It is whatever we could be tempted to sell our souls for in order to have a hundred extra years just to devote to it, whatever fills us with the feeling poet Anne Sexton was referring to when she said that “when I’m writing, I know I’m doing the thing I was born to do.” It is what matters most, whether we’re doing it or not. –(?)
I can’t take a well-tanned person seriously. –Cleveland Amory
Look for the ridiculous in everything and you find it. –Jules Renard
We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. –Marcel Proust
When your brain howls, when your body burns and aches, when you believe you have been abandoned, or you feel someone, something, closing you in so you cannot breathe, take a day. Do nothing. Sleep when you are tired. Eat when you are hungry. Move when you must. Dream. –Mary Sojourner, Dreamweaving
... the mind is conscious, but conscious of nothing
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing;
Wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing;
There is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
–TS Eliot, The Four Quartets, “East Coker”
To stay in places and to leave, to trust, to distrust, to no longer believe and believe again, to care about fishes, the different winds, the changes of the seasons, to see what happens, to be out in boats, to sit in a saddle, to watch the snow come, to watch it go, to hear rain on a tent, to know where I can find what I want. –Ernest Hemingway, on his favorite things
Write regularly! Don’t surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it every moment. –Franz Kafka, in his journal
How can you gather together the thousand fragments of each person? –George Seferis, “Sixteen Haiku, #11”
You’re crying. You say you’ve burned yourself.
But can you think of anyone who’s not
hazy with smoke?
–Rumi, “Saladin’s Begging Bowl”
Try and be a sheet of paper with nothing on it.
Be a spot of ground where nothing is growing,
where something might be planted,
a seed, possibly, from the Absolute.
–Rumi, “The Fragile Vial”
All night I have dreamed of destruction, annihilations—
An assembly-line of cut throats, and you and I
Inching off in the gray Chevrolet, drinking the green
Poison of stilled lawns, the little clapboard gravestones,
Noiseless, on rubber wheels, on the way to the sea resort.
–Sylvia Plath, “Waking in Winter”
The millstones grind up everything
and everything turns into stars.
–George Seferis, “Summer Solstice”
Everyone sees visions
but no one admits to it;
they continue to live thinking they’re alone.
–ditto
Yet what is more remarkable than that a tiny minority of souls reach a point where they entrust their bodies to the force of gravity [committing suicide by jumping] is that so few of the rest of us will splurge an hour of a summer day gazing at the trees and sky. How many summers do we have? One sees prosperous families in the city who keep plants in their apartment windows that have grown so high they block the sunlight and appear to be doing the living for the tenants who are bolted inside. But beauty is nobody’s sure salvation: not the beauty of a swimming hole if you get a cramp, and not the beauty of a woman if she doesn’t care for you. The swimming hole looks inviting under the blue sky, with its amber bottom, green sedges sticking up in the shallows, and curls of gentle current over a waterlogged birch tree two feet beneath the surface, near the brook that feeds it. Come back at dusk, however, and the pond turns black—as dark as death—or on the contrary, a restful dark, a dark to savor. Take it as you will. –Edward Hoagland, “Heaven and Nature”
Heroes know that things must happen when it is time for them to happen. A quest may not simply be abandoned ... A happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story. –Prince Lir in The Last Unicorn
When you forget the beginner’s awe, you start decaying. –Nobuko Albery
To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly; talk gently; act frankly; to listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages, with open heart; to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common, this is to be my symphony. –William Henry Channing
Grant me that I may be beautiful in my soul within, and that all external possessions be in harmony with my inner man. May I consider the wise man rich, and may I have such wealth as only the self-restrained man can bear or endure. –Prayer of Socrates
He has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much; who has enjoyed the trust of pure women, the respect of intelligent men, and the love of little children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who has left the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who has never lacked appreciation of earth’s beauty or failed to express it; who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best he had; whose life was an inspiration; whose memory is a benediction. –Bessie A. Stanley, in a contest-winning essay sponsored by Modern Women
Share everything. Play fair. Don’t hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don’t take things that aren’t yours. Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody. Wash your hands before you eat. Flush. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you. Live a balanced life—learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some. –Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
Let me not fall
And when I fall
Let there be strong hands to catch me
And when those hands are weak
Let me raise myself
And understand weakness in my strength
That can only come from weakness
Let my love be big enough
To carry you
And be carried by you
For every love is tested
And leaving one trial
There comes another
Let me see light in the darkness
And never forget the darkness in light
So be it.
–Imogen Slater, “Prayer”
What you really value is what you miss, not what you have. –Jorge Luis Borges
Nothing good can be said for errands and housework except the twinge of relief at having gotten at least some of them done before nightfall. –Barbara Holland, Endangered Pleasure
This question Lies
Which part scares me more
My love for you
Or this need
This need to be away…
–Anonymous, “Answers”
Our chief defect is that we are more given to talking about things than to doing them. –Jawaharlal Nehru
To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth… –Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again
There are no happy endings because nothing ends. –Schmendrick, in The Last Unicorn
We are novices of a new life
Maybe we are living the last bad days
Maybe we shall live the first good days too
There is something bitter in this air
Between the past and the future
Between suffering and joy
Between anger and forgiveness.
–Cemal Sureya
Items from a Cirque du Soleil booklet:
A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask. –Susan Sontag, On Photography
Is there ever any particular spot where one can put one’s finger and say, “It all began that day, at such a time and such a place, with such an incident?” –Agatha Christie, Endless Night
A man worthy of praise is oftentimes despised during his lifetime. But when he is removed by death, his loss comes to be severely felt. –Fakhir Al-Din Razi
When the white man wins, it is a battle. When the Indian wins, it is a massacre. –Native American maxim (c. 1880)
There are two ways of exerting one’s strength: one is pushing down, the other is pulling up. –Booker T. Washington
The dream of reason produces monsters. –Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Los Caprichos
Before you can break out of prison, you must first realize you’re locked up. –(?)
Never accept the proposition that just because a solution satisfies a problem, that it must be the only solution. –Raymond E. Feist
It’s a rash man who reaches a conclusion before he gets to it. –Jacob Levin
I had reasoned this out in my mind: There was two things I had a right to, liberty and death. If I could not have one, I would have the other, for no man should take me alive. –Harriet Tubman
Handguns are available for self protection in Seattle, but not in nearby Vancouver, Canada; handgun killings are five times more common and the handgun suicide rate is ten times greater in Seattle. Guns make impulsive killing easy. –Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World
All day you stare at us, we
who may not touch
your weeping or your blood.
–Heather McHugh
Have nothing…that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful. –William Morris
Her passion and her make-up are those of the tragic actress—their plaster has peeled off already. –George Seferis, “Summer Solstice”
No one knows what is in the secret heart of another. –Charles Dickens
Look around you. I have found you cannot tell by looking at the surface what is lurking there beneath it. –(?)
Be kind. Everyone you meet is fighting a battle. –(?)
What happens when our symbols are turned upside down? Will all the luck run out? What if it did? Will the food chain reverse? Dust and dirt remain constant. –from a 1996 issue of Dark’s Art Parlour
Is not the night mournful, sad, and melancholy? –Rabelais, Gargantua
Night, when words fade and things come alive. –Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras
After us, the flood. –Madame de Pompadour
I will have no laws. I will acknowledge none. I protest against every law which an authority calling itself necessary imposes upon my free will. –Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Idée générale de la révolution
He bears the seed of ruin in himself. –Matthew Arnold, “Merope”
Write the bad things that are done to you in sand, but write the good things that happen to you on a piece of marble. –Arabic proverb
A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world. Everyone you meet is your mirror. –Ken Keys
We should feel sorrow, but not sink under its oppression; the heart of a wise man should resemble a mirror, which reflects every object without being sullied by any. –Confucius, Analects
Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings—always darker, emptier, and simpler. –Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
If we were always conscious of the fact that people precious to us are frighteningly mortal, hanging not even by a thread but by a wisp of gossamer, perhaps we would be kinder to them and more grateful for the love and friendship they give us. –Dean Koontz, Seize the Night
Blessed are the oblivious for they shall give me no trouble. –Goldberry Long, Juniper Tree Burning
A wise man adapts himself to circumstances, as water shapes itself to the vessel that contains it. –Chinese Proverb
Souls
longing to leave the body
thirst, but they can’t find water anywhere:
they stick here, stick there, haphazardly,
birds caught in lime—
in vain they struggle
until their wings fail completely.
–George Seferis, “Summer Solstice”
I should sit on a rock off Cornwall and comb my hair.
I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair.
We should meet in another life, we should meet in air,
Me and you.
–Sylvia Plath, “Lesbos”
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.
–Sylvia Plath, “Daddy”
… there is no end … to the sharp objects in the heart. –Rachel Loden, “Locked Ward, Newton, Connecticut”
I have a perfect cure for a sore throat: cut it. –Alfred Hitchcock
If my film makes one more person miserable, I’ve done my job. –Woody Allen
Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person. –Mark Twain
It is almost impossible systematically to constitute a natural moral law. Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil. –Anatole France
The stars are not malignant. Worse: they are careless, without a shred of compassion for us, no matter what cry we send into the dark toward those pricks of light, which every night shed their death upon our mysterious lives. –Patricia Hampl, Virgin Time
Sweet is the lore that nature brings:
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:
—We murder to dissect.
–William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned”
If you can’t say anything good about someone, sit right here with me. –Alice Roosevelt Longworth
“Oh God,” she cried,
“I never knew what
it meant to be real
I thought all this was a joke,
I never let the horror, or
the sweetness & the dignity
penetrate my brain.”
–Jim Morrison, an untitled piece in Wilderness
And I came to you
for peace
And I came to you
for gold
And I came to you
for lies
And you gave me fever
& wisdom
& cries
of sorrow
& we’ll be here
the next day
the next day
&
Tomorrow.
–ditto
I called you to announce
sadness falling like
burned skin
I called you to wish
you well, to glory in
self like a new monster
& now I call on you
to pray:
–Jim Morrison, “& the Cool Fluttering…”
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch. –Lily Tomlin
The world ended in May. I was born in May. I died in May. We started the journey of ugliness on May 29th. We headed for Auschwitz. We arrived on May 31st. The scent of spring wasn’t delicious. The earth didn’t smile. It shrieked in pain. The air was filled with the stench of death. Unnatural death. The smoke was thick. The sun couldn’t crack through. The scent was the smell of burning flesh. The burning flesh was your mother. I am condemned to walk the earth for all my days with the stench of burning flesh in my nostrils. May is damned. May should be abolished. May hurts. There should only be eleven months in a year. May should be set aside for tears. For six million years, to cleanse the earth. –Isabella Leitner, Fragments of Isabella
This universe, which is the same for all, has not been made by any god or man, but it always has been, is, and will be an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures… The phases of fire are craving and satiety. –Heraclitus of Ephesus
In the hope of reaching the moon
men fail to see the flowers
that blossom at their feet.
–Albert Schweitzer
We’re all responsible for defining who we are and getting back to our own home, whatever that home is. For growing and deciding who we want to be in that growth, touching other people along the way. –Dee Wallace, on lessons she learned when making E.T.
For a moment, here, in the calm he knows is only the eye of the storm, in the center of a turbulence that, despite everything anyone has ever written or said, might not mean a thing, he can only stare into his friend’s gentle face, and listen, with gratitude, to the sounds of the world around him. –Adam Haslett, “My Father’s Business”
Do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we even do it? –George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion
If at first you don’t succeed, try again. Then give up. There’s no point making a damn fool of yourself. –WC Fields
If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style. –Quentin Crisp
It is not enough to succeed; others must fail. –Gore Vidal
I am convinced that we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the misfortunes and pains of others. –Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and Beautiful
Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in. –Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education
There is no sin except stupidity. –Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist
To walk, we have to lean forward, lose our balance, and begin to fall. We let go constantly of the previous stability, falling all the time, trusting that we will find a succession of new stabilities with each step. –Robin Skynner
What an absurd amount of energy I have been wasting all my life trying to figure out how things “really are” when all the time they weren’t. –Hugh Prather, Notes to Myself
I have carried several oceans
in my head for company
so that when I found myself
within the middle earth
I’d have water,
wide and deep enough
to wash the dirt
from every chamber
of my brain.
–Rod McKuen, Alone
We eat and drink flesh
the color of garnets, rubies, wounds.
It is bitter just under the skin.
–(?)
Hide until everybody goes home.
Hide until everybody forgets about you.
Hide until everybody dies.
–Yoko Ono, “Hide-and-Seek Piece”
Draw a map to get lost. –Yoko Ono, “Map Piece”
Scream.
1. against the wind
2. against the wall
3. against the sky.
–Yoko Ono, “Voice Piece for Soprano”
Hit a wall with your head. –Yoko Ono, “Wall Piece for Orchestra”
Get a telephone that only echoes back your voice.
Call every day and talk about many things.
–Yoko Ono, “Echo Telephone Piece”
Make a key.
Find a lock that fits.
If you find it, burn the house
that is attached to it.
–Yoko Ono, “Travel Piece”
A shiver came quick
grabbed me up by the back of the neck
and shook me down to the floor
through my shoes, to the floor, to the core of the earth
I muttered something, swallowed some air
science, miracles, monkeys, or prayer
I’ll believe in anything when I’m there
I’m certain I’ve said that before
I’ll believe in anything when I’m there
I’m certain I’ve said that before.
–REM, from Tourfilm
Hey man, I’m making moves
and I am so much stronger than you
I am so much stronger
I’m much stronger than you
Everybody thinks the way that we thought
we thought ahead and look what we got
I did not invent this world
all my words a string of pearls
but you will find the sea
it loses all its luster.
–ditto
What will remain of those days? When it all meant something to you, the kids, and me? It was more than just something, yes, but it’s changed. And what will remain of those things that used to be? Some say they’re gone, but they’ll never be gone in me. And I will remain to see those days again. Like before when to me it felt like something more. But it didn’t die, it’s just been ignored. People change, time is rearranged, lives and goals do not remain the same. What will remain? I will remain. –(?)
And that was what now she often felt the need of—to think … to be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. …When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless … The core of darkness could go anywhere, for no one saw it. They could not stop it, she thought, exulting. There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform of stability. –Virginia Woolf
There’s a part of me that loves to go out in the world looking like a total slob. I guess it’s my way of saying, “Fuck it. I don’t give a shit about what anyone thinks I look like.” And yet, another part of me knows that under the defiance, the way I look is a reflection of the way I feel, a walking advertisement of myself as a loser. – Martha Manning, Undercurrents: A Life Beneath the Surface
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved. –Helen Keller, journal
I feel no hatred for anyone. Just myself. –J. Stile
I am trapped inside a part of me I hate. –Jennifer Lynch, The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer
There was one plus about profound self-loathing. Nobody could hate you worse than you hated yourself. –Francine Pascal, Fearless
I felt ugly, weak, overwhelmed. I couldn’t imagine being capable of doing anything. –Shirley Manson
I feel disgusting. I could take a knife to my throat for the way I look. Can someone just put a bin or a bag or a fucking bomb on my head? –ditto
When things seem best, it is time to worry most intensely. –Fang
Television is the first truly democratic culture—the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what the people want. –Clive Barnes
Television is democracy at its ugliest. –Paddy Chayefsky
Somewhere
under the non-existent self-control
the laughter-filled drinking binges
the carefully maintained distances
somewhere.
–Lennie St. Luce, “Why?”
You are free, and that is why you are lost. –Franz Kafka
Meanwhile it sometimes seems better to me to sleep than to be so completely without companions as we are, to be always waiting like this; and what’s to be done or said in the meanwhile I don’t know, and what is the use of poets in a mean-spirited time? –Friedrich Hölderlin, Bread and Wine
The one thing you dreaded: letting yourself fall, taking the step into uncertainty, the little step beyond all the securities that existed. And whoever had once surrendered himself, one single time, whoever had entrusted himself to fate was liberated. –Hermann Hesse
We have come and we are better than you! –Michael Sacchins, in his 1994 graduation valedictory speech at the American Community Schools in Athens, Greece
Terry is a wanker. –written on my desk in my semiotics seminar (it made me smile because my boyfriend’s name was Terry)
But he only saw dying light and a dead land. He uttered no prayer, believed in no deity, and knew that the past was devoid of meaning like the present, and a refuge for cowards. –EM Forster, Maurice
Feeling hurts like shit; well, hard shit … it tears you on the way out and makes you bleed. –from the Bodies Under Siege listserv
I want to get away from the inanities of this world, the materialism, the pointlessness…As I wrote in my journal a few weeks ago, “I feel so lost. Not because if this person or that—because of ME. I have lost myself ... help me find peace, God. Not this person or that thing, not happiness, just peace.” –from one of my listservs
Our taste has become so uncertain that often we no longer know whether a thing is art or a disease. –Carl Jung
There’s something oddly sensual about Tim Curry, dressed like a clown with fangs, repeatedly asking John Ritter if he wants it. –Matt, x-entertainment.com, discussing the movie It
I don’t like buses. To ride a bus is to wonder how you’re going to die. … Think about it. Think of the form of transportation where there’s the most mass death. Bus. –Margo Kaufman
Hopelessness filled him like cold water. There was no base of communication with these beautiful chosen ones. They existed up where the air was rare. –Stephen King, “The Running Man”
Whitsuntide has always been considered by the Irish as a very fatal and unlucky time—for the people hold that fairies and evil spirits have then great power over men and cattle, both by sea and land, and work their spells with malign and mysterious efficacy. Children born at Whitsuntide, it is said, are foredoomed; they will either have the evil eye, or commit a murder, or die a violent death. –Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms, and Superstitions of Ireland [This interests me because I was born during Whitsuntide]
To turn away ill-luck from a child born at that time (Whitsuntide), a grave must be dug and the infant laid in it for a few minutes. After this, the evil spell is broken, and the child is safe. –Lady Wilde, Ancient Cures, Charms, and Usages of Ireland
It was widely believed that any animal or human born at Whitsuntide would die a violent death or cause the death of another. However, there was a simple way to avoid this fate and that was to have the infant creature kill something. Most often, a live insect was put into a baby’s hand and the little fingers squeezed on it until the insect was dead. Having caused a death, the child was freed from the spell. A baby animal was made to perform the same ritual so that it too, would be saved from the ill-fortune of being born on this day. Counter charms such as this one were very common in old Ireland and were often used to protect against an evil influence. For example, it was believed that people, especially children, who were suffering from an illness were more likely to die at this time of year than at others. In some parts of Ireland, a green sod was laid on the head of the afflicted person in hopes that the mimicry of a burial might prevent an untimely death. –Bridget Haggerty
I am fascinated by Courtney Love, but the same way I am by someone who’s got Tourette’s syndrome walking in Central Park. –Madonna
Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall down an open manhole cover and die. –Mel Brooks
It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them. –Alfred Adler
I like persons better than principles and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world. –Oscar Wilde
I am not frightened of failure. I’m frightened of standing still. –Jon Bon Jovi
I want to speak with many things
and I will not leave this planet
without knowing what I came to seek …
–Pablo Neruda, “Pastoral”
_________________________________________
But because I ask for silence,
don’t think I'm going to die.
The opposite is true;
it happens I’m going to live.
To be, and to go on being.
I will not be, however, if, inside me,
the crop does not keep sprouting,
the shoots first, breaking through the earth
to reach the light;
but the mothering earth is dark,
and, deep inside me, I am dark.
I am a well in the water of which
the night leaves stars behind
and goes on alone across fields.
–Pablo Neruda, “I Ask for Silence”
_________________________________________
Another advantage of ugly: you don’t waste time trying to look your best; you will never look your best. –Joyce Carol Oates, “Ugly”
From nonexistence I entered existence and what did I find? Bad weather. –William Markiewicz, Extracts of Existence
Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis. –Ralph Waldo Emerson
We always want to believe there is a place better than our own … –Loreena McKennitt, in the liner notes to The Book of Secrets
For a long time, I believed the opposite of passion was death. I was wrong. Passion and death are implicit, one in the other. Past the border of a fiery life lies the netherworld. I can trace this road, which took me through places so hot the very air burned the lungs. I did not turn back. I pressed on, and eventually passed over the border, beyond which lies a place that is wordless and cold, so cold that it, like mercury, burns a freezing blue flame. –Marya Hornbacher, Wasted
To escape criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing. –Elbert Hubbard
I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I have the guts to betray my country. –EM Forster, “What I Believe,” in Two Cheers for Democracy
Owing to lack of interest, tomorrow has been cancelled. –graffiti
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. –Oscar Wilde
Don’t talk about yourself; it will be done when you leave. –William Mizner
I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand. –Chinese proverb
Trouble, they say, is like sunshine. It sours milk but sweetens apples. Trouble can diminish faith or deepen it. –Rev. Roger Collins, at Jill Dando’s funeral
Who would ever think that so much went on in the soul of a young girl? –Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank
My husband and I didn’t sign a pre-nuptial agreement. We signed a mutual suicide pact. –Roseanne
All the world’s a cage. –Heanne Philips
The fellow that agrees with everything you say is either a fool or he is getting ready to skin you. –Kin Hubbard
I don’t understand anything about the ballet; all I know is that during the intervals the ballerinas stink like horses. –Anton Chekhov
Is fuel efficiency really what we need most desperately? I say what we really need is a car that can be shot when it breaks down. –Russell Baker
A celebrity is a person who works hard all his life to become well-known, then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized. –Fred Allen
The nice thing about being a celebrity is that when you bore people, they think it’s their fault. –Henry Kissinger
If you can’t give me love and peace, then give me bitter fame. –Anna Akhmatova
He’s fun because he doesn’t make sense. –Carrie Fisher’s opinion of Jack Nicholson
Cleanliness is almost as bad as godliness. –Samuel Butler
But it seemed to me that perhaps there is something about the sounding of horns and the shouting of obscenities that’s necessary for the life and traffic flow of any city. –Geoff Nicholson, Bleeding London
Every decision you make is a mistake. –Edward Dahlberg
All the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral, or fattening. –Alexander Woollcott
You know how on the evening news they always tell you that the stock market is up in active trading, or off in moderate trading, or trading in mixed activity, or whatever? Well, who gives a shit? –Dave Barry
There’s a fine line between fishing and just standing on the shore like an idiot. –Steven Wright
If I had a hammer—I’d use it on Peter, Paul, and Mary. –Howard Rosenberg
Never kick a fresh turd on a hot day. –attributed to Harry S Truman
Guilt is a wicked thing. Once it gets into you it’s harder to get rid of than a cancer. –Christopher Pike, Last Act
You have to love what is lovable, and hate what is hateable. It takes a real man to know the difference. –Oscar Wilde
There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they’re necessary to reach the places we’ve chosen to go. –Richard Bach, The Bridge across Forever
A diamond is only forever. Give that someone special something that dies. –sign on the front of a San Fernando valley floral shop
I never thought it would end like this.
To tell the truth, I never thought it would end at all.
There are forces acting on us, with or without our consent.
Forces sure of themselves as gravity.
I thought knowing myself with the same certainty would keep me safe.
But ... surprise ...
As they say, “What a long, strange trip this has been.”
–Alex Glaser
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. –Sir Winston Churchill, in a speech at Mansion House, London, on November 10, 1942
A synonym is a word you use in place of one you can’t spell. –seen on the internet
Don’t think there are no crocodiles because the water is calm. –ditto
Don’t think you’re on the right road just because it’s a well-beaten path. –ditto
It is within the experience of everyone that when pleasure and pain reach a certain intensity they are indistinguishable. –Arnold Bennell
In the early days all I hoped was to make a living out of what I did best. But since there’s no real market for masturbation I had to fall back on my bass-playing abilities. –Les Claypool
And then there are all those euphemisms for disabilities: physically challenged, different abled—of which a friend of mine who is disabled says, “How am I ‘differently abled’? Like, my unique ability is that without a wheelchair I have to drag myself across the floor?” –Cathy Crimmins
Privacy—you can’t find it anywhere, not even if you want to hang yourself. –Menander
To err is dysfunctional, to forgive codependent. –Berton Averre
Someday I want to be rich. Some people get so rich they lose respect for humanity. That’s how rich I want to be. –Rita Rudner
The penalty for success is to be bored by the people who used to snub you. –Nancy Astor
I was much distressed by next-door people who had twin babies and played the violin; but one of the twins died, and the other has eaten the fiddle, so all is peace. –Edward Lear
Year, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments. –Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
Without fanaticism, one cannot accomplish anything. –Eva Peron
I think of myself as an intelligent, sensitive human being with the soul of a clown which always forces me to blow it at the most important moments. –Jim Morrison
I would cry if I knew how. I’m so hopelessly apathetic and unmotivated it is frustrating. –J. Stile
We couldn’t possibly know where it would lead, but we knew it had to be done. –Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life
Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t. –Erica Jong, How to Save Your Own Life
I don’t know how to fight. All I know is how to stay alive. –Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Lead me not into temptation; I can find the way myself. –Rita Mae Brown
I’ve been on so many blind dates, I should get a free dog. –Wendy Liebman
Here I sit, broken-hearted; tried to shit but only farted. –graffiti in a Stormville, NY, rest stop bathroom
I hate cheering, excited people… I marched up to my manager, took him off in private, told him if I was going to be expected to attend events with marching bands and cheering loud people and this disgusting enthusiasm, I would have to leave this job. –from one of my listservs
There are images I need to complete my own reality. –Jim Morrison
On the one hand, we’ll never experience childbirth. On the other hand, we can open all our own jars. –Bruce Willis (On the difference between men and women)
The Web brings people together because no matter what kind of a twisted sexual mutant you happen to be, you’ve got millions of pals out there. Type in “Find people that have sex with goats that are on fire” and the computer will ask, “Specify type of goat.” – (?)
There are only two reasons to sit in the back row of an airplane: Either you have diarrhea, or you’re anxious to meet people who do. – (?)
I saw a woman wearing a sweatshirt with “Guess” on it. I said, “Thyroid problem?” – (?)
The golf course is the only place I can dress like a pimp and fit in. Anywhere else, wearing lime-green pants and alligator shoes, I got a cop on my buns. –Samuel L. Jackson
Hockey is a sport for white men. Basketball is a sport for black men. Golf is a sport for white men dressed like black pimps. – (?)
I discovered I scream the same way whether I’m about to be devoured by a Great White or if a piece of seaweed touches my foot. – (?)
Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, wisdom is not truth, truth is not beauty, beauty is not love. –(?)
Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names. –John F. Kennedy
The best way to judge a man’s character is to see what he does when he thinks no one is looking. –Poserina
We’re all in this alone. –Tomlin
It’s not that I have nothing to give, but rather that no one wants what I have. –Dan Goodman, Meditations for Miserable People Who Want to Stay that Way
I cannot retrieve my inner child, for it is dead and buried in my backyard. –ditto
Jealousy is wanting what others have. Stupidity is thinking you might one day get it. –ditto
Killing is an excellent way of dealing with a hostility problem. –James Coburn, in The President’s Analyst
Everything is funny. As long as it happens to someone else. –Will Rogers
Let be be finale of seem. –Wallace Stevens, “Emperor of Ice Cream”
When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you. –Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be a part of your revolution. –Emma Goldman
So this was the way the world was to end. Not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with retching nausea as the teeming billions struggled for their final gulps of food and air before sinking forever into the stench, filth, disease, and slime that would certainly be our final environment in the huge rubbish dump and toilet that we have created out of paradise. –Ben Elton, Stark
As rust corrupts iron, so envy corrupts man. –Anisthenes
Snobbery is the pride of those who are not sure of their position. –Braley
N’ayant pu me corrompre, ils m’ont assassiné. [Not having been able to corrupt me, they have assassinated me.] –written on a postcard version of Louis David’s painting “The Death of Marat”
My body was given back to me sprawled out, distorted, recolored, clad in mourning in that white winter day. –Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask
I can tell you that our bodies sometimes serve as the symbolic ground where order and disorder fight for supremacy, an uneasy divide that to some of us feels as porous and inconstant as a frayed tatter of gauze. –Caroline Kettlewell, Skin Game
Oh God
Why
am I so much more sensitive than everybody else?
Why
do I feel things so much more acutely than them,
and understand so much more?
I bet I’m the first person who’s ever felt as
rotten as this.
Could it be
that I’m going to grow up
to be a great poet and thinker, and all those
other wankers in my class
are going to have to work in factories
or go on the dole?
Yes, I think it could.
–Rick’s teen anguish poem, from Bachelor Boys, a Young Ones book
Capital punishment turns the state into a murderer. But imprisonment turns the state into a gay dungeon-master. – (?)
My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch. –(?)
… It is as if we were all parts of an electrical force which interconnects all things, or partook of the pure essence that encompasses all things. –K’ang Yu-wei, Da Tongshu
There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the blackness of corroding despair. –Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”
Some people say that I must be a horrible person, but that’s not true. I have the heart of a young boy—on a jar on my desk. –Stephen King
You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don’t try. –Beverly Sills
Our ability to delude ourselves may be an important survival tool. –Jane Wagner
Until you lose your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was, or what freedom really is. –Margaret Mitchell
There is a remarkable breakdown of taste and intelligence at Christmastime. Mature, responsible grown men wear neckties made out of holly leaves and drink alcoholic beverages with raw egg yolks and cottage cheese in them. –PJ O’Rourke
You never really understood me—never really even tried. –Kate Bush
I’ve been trying for some time to develop a lifestyle that doesn’t require my presence. –Gary Trudeau
Instead of perfume there will be rottenness. –Isaiah 3:24
I do not deny that many things do disturb me. –Cebes, in Phaedo
When the Tukanas cut off her head, the old woman collected her own blood in
her hands and blew it towards the sun.
“My soul enters you, too!” she shouted.
Since then, anyone who kills receives in his
body, without waning or knowing it, the soul of his victim.
–Eduardo Galeano, Memory of Fire: Genesis
Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
First I stripped her naked; how she did kick, bite, and scratch! I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat back to my room, to cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me nine days to eat her entire body. I did not fuck her, though I could have, had I wished. She died a virgin. –serial killer Albert Fish
It is better to pooh blood then to eat bloody pooh. –baffling quote spotted on the internet
I called a detox center, just to see how much it would cost: $13,000 for three and a half weeks! My friends, if you can come up with thirteen grand, you don’t have a problem yet! –Sam Kinison
Anyone who gives a surgeon six thousand dollars for “breast augmentation” should give some thought to investing a little more on brain augmentation. –Mike Royko
Maybe because they find it easier to masturbate. –Crow’s friend Annie, on why men sleep in the nude more frequently than women [seen on Isca BBS]
That’s my name, dipshit! –Tivka to Dawn, as Dawn read a medicine bottle, thinking Tivka’s last name was a prescription drug [seen on Isca BBS]
I don’t even feel like thinking anymore. I’m going away now. –Ooseven’s brother [seen on Isca BBS]
If you can’t eat it and you can’t fuck it, then piss on it! –Pinacolada’s ex-boyfriend [seen on Isca BBS]
To go into debt before living in poverty. –Wadjet’s friend, when asked why she was in college if she’s going to be a writer [seen on Isca BBS]
Men—gotta love ’em: organizational skills of sheep. –someone commenting on Thgarris and his friends [seen on Isca BBS]
Roses are red
Violets are blue
Chrysanthemums are purple—
Let’s fuck.
–audience participation at Rocky Horror Picture Show
I may look bored, but there is a Barry Manilow concert going on inside my head. –seen on the internet
Reality is for people who lack imagination. –ditto
Reality’s the only obstacle to happiness. –ditto
Suburbia: where they tear out the trees & then name streets after them. –ditto
I just want revenge. Is that so wrong? –ditto
Not all men are annoying. Some are dead. –ditto
