Favorite passages, quotes, poems

[imsuperman]

"Yesterday's gone on down the river and you can't get it back."

Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove

 

“All it comes down to is this: I feel like **** but look great.”

-Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

 

“Maybe there aren't any such things as good friends or bad friends - maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you're hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they're always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for too, if that's what has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.”

― Stephen King, It

[RainyCoast]

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

 

exactly what i needed to read today.

[TMifune]

"Love seeketh not itself to please,

Nor for itself hath any care,

But for another gives its ease,

And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair."

 

So sung a little Clod of Clay

Trodden with the cattle's feet,

But a Pebble of the brook

Warbled out these metres meet:

 

"Love seeketh only self to please,

To bind another to its delight,

Joys in another's loss of ease,

And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite."

 

William Blake

[RainyCoast]

The world won't last.

What are You? What am I?

 

-Yunus Emre

 

 

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

 

—from "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg

 

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,

Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

 

—from "Burnt Norton" (Part 1 of "Four Quartets") by T. S. Eliot

 

 

When she heard the news, my mother caused the

Greek fleet to be deprived of favorable winds on its

way to Troy. Witch, they called her, dirty witch—and

she, so pretty, chopping the mushrooms, laughing and

crying over the stew pot.

 

—from "Heroic Moment" by Charles Simic

 

 

I speak frankly and that makes me happy:

I am the slave of love, I am free of both worlds.

 

I am a bird from heaven's garden. How do I describe that separation,

my fall into this snare of accidents?

Hafiz - Ghazal 44 - "The Green Sea of Heaven"

 

 

Hi TMdude, you're back!

 

 

I feel like **** but look great.

it's a weird but apparently frequent occurence, innit?

[RainyCoast]

Some day I shall sing to thee in the sunrise of some other world, "I have seen thee before in the light of the earth, in the love of man."

-Tagore, Stray birds

[RainyCoast]

“I paid, got up, walked

to the door, opened

it.

 

I heard the man

say, "that guy's

nuts."

 

out on the street I

walked north

feeling

curiously

honored.”

- Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

 

“Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well- warmed, and well-fed.”

- Herman Melville

 

“I have not asked for life.

But I try to accept whatever

life brings without surprise.

And I shall depart again without having

questioned anyone about my strange

stay here on earth.”

- Omar Khayyam

 

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

By the false azure in the windowpane;

I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I

Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

And from the inside, too, I’d duplicate

Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:

Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass

Hang all the furniture above the grass,

And how delightful when a fall of snow

Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so

As to make chair and bed exactly stand

Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!

-Nabokov

[imsuperman]

"War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner."

-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

 

“Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand.”

― Stephen King, It

 

"Dreams save us. Dreams lift us up and transform us. And on my soul, I swear... until my dream of a world where dignity, honor and justice becomes the reality we all share -- I'll never stop fighting." - Superman Action Comics #775: What's so funny about truth, justice and the American Way? by Joe Kelly

[RainyCoast]

While I have been fumbling over books

And thinking about God and the Devil and all,

Other young men have been battling with the days

And others have been kissing the beautiful women.

They have brazen faces like battering-rams.

But I who think about books and such-

I crumble to impotent dust before the struggling,

And the women palsy me with fear.

But when it comes to fumbling over books

And thinking about God and the Devil and all,

Why, there I am.

But perhaps the battering-rams are in the right of it,

Perhaps, perhaps ... God knows.

 

Aldous Huxley

[Hermes]

“The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” - Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor

[tina-rocks]

I found this fascinating and first read when the series the Thorn Birds aired in the 80s. There are different quotes of this and today I looked again and found this one. Thought I would post it after seeing this thread. Great idea by the way.

 

WRITTEN BY FR. FERNAND CASSISTA, M.S.

Recently, I read a beautiful book entitled, The Seven Last Words of Jesus by Fr. Alfred McBride (St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1990, paper, 87 pages). Father McBride begins his book with the legend of the thorn bird:

 

The Song of the Thorn Bird

 

Untitled-1“According to legend, the thorn bird sings just once in its life. Leaving its nest, it searches for a bush with long, sharp thorns. Upon finding such a bush it impales itself on the biggest thorn. At that moment it begins to sing.

 

“The bird out-carols the lark and the nightingale and the world pauses to listen. God smiles with pleasure at the captivating melody. What is the message of this sacrificial music? Life's most satisfying moment can be purchased only at the price of great pain – so says the legend.

[RainyCoast]

“When they write my obituary. Tomorrow. Or the next day. It will say, Leo Gursky is survived by an apartment full of ”

- Nicole Krauss, The History of Love

 

 

You know what I shall die of? I shall die of eating an unwashed grape. One day out on the ocean I will die--with my hand in the hand of some nice looking ship's doctor, a very young one with a small blond moustache and a big silver watch. "Poor lady," they'll say, "The quinine did her no good. That unwashed grape has transported her soul to heaven.”

- Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

 

“There must be a government, said the first blind man, I'm not so sure, but there is, it will be a government of the blind trying to rule the blind, that is to say, nothingness trying to organize nothingness.”

- José Saramago, Blindness

 

 

“Dave once asked me what blind people dream about. Mostly in sound and feeling, I replied. At night I fall in love with a voice, and then wake to a feeling of physical loss. Sometimes I close my eyes to a chorus of “Happy Birthday!” The smell of cake and the sound of feet under the table. I awake in a body that’s too big. I also dream in motion and sensation. My father’s boat and the snore of the mast; the rough fabric of the safety harness and the rip of Velcro. The sun on my legs. And endless stretch of water impossible to imagine.”

- Simon Van Booy, The Illusion of Separateness

 

 

In a seeming paradox, it is the people who need the constant stimulation of others who are often most alone and least engaged with the world. Social activity is essentially a distraction from the existential challenge of confronting what is inside them. Hollow men don't sit and read. —Julian Baggini

 

He gave me a severe look over his spectacles and said, as if he thought the words were deadly venom and might kill me, "You are an untidy person.”

- Jim Butcher, Turn Coat

 

“Philip wasn't the sort of man to make a friend of a woman. He wanted devotion. I gave him that. I did, you know. But I couldn't stand being made a fool of. I couldn;t stand being put on probation, like an office-boy, to see if I was good enough to be condescended to. I quite thought he was honest when he said he didn't believe in marriage -- and then it turned out that it was a test, to see whether my devotion was abject enough. Well, it wasn't. I didn't like having matrimony offered as a bad-conduct prize.”

- Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

 

“Every individual needs revolution, inner division, overthrow of the existing order, and renewal, but not by forcing them upon his neighbors under the hypocritical cloak of Christian love or the sense of social responsibility or any of the other beautiful euphemisms for unconscious urges to personal power.”

-C.G. Jung

 

 

“I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.”

- Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

 

 

“A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs—something, anything.... Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.”

- Emil Cioran

 

 

“A phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self — a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his companion struggles against the oncoming disaster, or decides to embrace it. There is a theatrical quality about all this, and during the next several days, as I went about stolidly preparing for extinction, I couldn't shake off a sense of melodrama — a melodrama in which I, the victim-to-be of self-murder, was both the solitary actor and lone member of the audience.”

- William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

 

 

“In the recumbence of depression, your information-gathering system collates its intelligence and reports to you these facts: (1) there is nothing to do; (2) there is nowhere to go; (3) there is nothing to be; (4) there is no one to know. Without meaning-charged emotions keeping your brain on the straight and narrow, you would lose your balance and fall into an abyss of lucidity. And for a conscious being, lucidity is a cocktail without ingredients, a crystal clear concoction that will leave you hung over with reality. In perfect knowledge there is only perfect nothingness, which is perfectly painful if what you want is meaning in your life.”

- Thomas Ligotti

 

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”

- Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

 

“Or you may be such a thunderingly exalted creature as to be altogether deaf and blind to anything but heavenly sights and sounds. Then the earth for you is only a standing place- whether to be like this is your loss or your gain I won't pretend to say.”

-Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

 

 

“...In another time, what cannot be seen will define us, and we shall be prompted

To say that language is error, and all things are wronged

By representation. The self, we shall say, can never be

Seen with a disguise, and never be seen without one.”

-Mark Strand, The Story of Our Lives: with The Monument and The Late Hour

[treesandbees]

“Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.”

Jane Austen, Emma

[RainyCoast]

"Harris said, however, that the river would suit him to a “T.” I don’t know what a “T” is (except a sixpenny one, which includes bread-and-butter and cake ad lib., and is cheap at the price, if you haven’t had any dinner). It seems to suit everybody, however, which is greatly to its credit."

 

Jerome K. Jerome, Three men in a boat

[RainyCoast]

>>There was the gate next, which she clung to.Agang of tears trudged from her eyes as she held on and refused to go inside. People started to gather on the street until Rosa Hubermannswore at them, after which they reversed back, whence they came.

* * * A TRANSLATION OF ROSA HUBERMANN’S ANNOUNCEMENT* * *

“What are you a**holes looking at?”

 

The Book Thief

[treesandbees]

The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

 

Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

Arthur C. Clarke

 

The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.

Charlotte Brontë

[imsuperman]

“But this road doesn't go anywhere,” I told him.

“That doesn't matter.”

“What does?” I asked, after a little while.

“Just that we're on it, dude,” he said.”

― Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

[RainyCoast]

i copied this into my notebook some time ago and forgot to add the source so i have no clue where it's from. but i chanced upon it last night when cleaning out my folder and it still hasn't lost the appeal for me:

 

Psychopathy seems to be present in both Western and non-Western cultures, including those that have had minimal exposure to media portrayals of the condition. In a 1976 study anthropologist Jane M. Murphy, then at Harvard University, found that an isolated group of Yupik-speaking Inuits near the Bering Strait had a term (kunlangeta) they used to describe “a man who repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and takes sexual advantage of many women, someone who does not pay attention to reprimands and who is always being brought to the elders for punishment.” When Murphy asked an Inuit what the group would typically do with a kunlangeta, he replied, “Somebody would have pushed him off the ice when nobody else was looking.”

[RainyCoast]

In the Language of Angels …

 

For the last two years that he lived, death was kind,

To have taken his mind and left, only, the child, again.

 

So that he would be oblivious to the ways he was mistreated.

Through all the indignities, he just smiled, recalling nothing.

 

This old, anomaly of a man, endured, simply to write,

Had, one day, written himself, out of life;

 

So, that night, staff had entered to pull him back

From the white light; Then, child-proofing his room,

 

The following afternoon, took away his pens, journals and books,

All that had given him life, they took away.

 

And, from thereafter, served his meals

With plastic sporks and spill proof cups.

 

Still, enraptured or insane, he would flail his arms:

A wild, white-haired, bed-ridden Maestro,

 

And waving his hand through the turbulent air,

As a light bulb becoming more brilliant, just before it blows,

 

He wrote, frantically, in this way, the last of his words,

But, this time, he ended with his epitaph.

 

Epilogue

 

They say, it was both written and lost on the wind;

That no one could transcribe the ethereal.

 

But, I say, he wrote in the Language of Angels,

You can read it all, replete,

in the Annals of the Akashic records…

 

8.3.8 John Tansey

[Jibralta]

i copied this into my notebook some time ago and forgot to add the source so i have no clue where it's from. but i chanced upon it last night when cleaning out my folder and it still hasn't lost the appeal for me:

 

Psychopathy seems to be present in both Western and non-Western cultures, including those that have had minimal exposure to media portrayals of the condition. In a 1976 study anthropologist Jane M. Murphy, then at Harvard University, found that an isolated group of Yupik-speaking Inuits near the Bering Strait had a term (kunlangeta) they used to describe “a man who repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and takes sexual advantage of many women, someone who does not pay attention to reprimands and who is always being brought to the elders for punishment.” When Murphy asked an Inuit what the group would typically do with a kunlangeta, he replied, “Somebody would have pushed him off the ice when nobody else was looking.”

 

 

 

It's interesting, but sociopathy doesn't seem to thrive well in small, self-governing cultures. They get away with it for a while, but after too many complaints the villagers kill the sociopath. Sometimes, as a courtesy, they even talk to the person's family about it beforehand!

[RainyCoast]

It's interesting, but sociopathy doesn't seem to thrive well in small, self-governing cultures. They get away with it for a while, but after too many complaints the villagers kill the sociopath. Sometimes, as a courtesy, they even talk to the person's family about it beforehand!

 

i find their pragmatic codex fascinating.

[RainyCoast]

I really feel sorry for you!

When I look at you during the night

I see in you the eye of tired day.

When I look at you during the day

I see in you the surrendered heart of night.

 

-Sri Chinmoy

[Jibralta]

i find their pragmatic codex fascinating.

 

I think that in small, self-governing societies, pragmatism is all they have

[treesandbees]

“The marks humans leave are too often scars.”

John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

[treesandbees]

The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others.

Albert Schweitzer

[Hermes]

You know how advice is. You only want it if it agrees with what you wanted to do anyway.

John Steinbeck