"The lesson of flea markets is that specific desire will be disappointed and alert curiosity rewarded."
--Joan Juliet Buck
_________
"My favorite poem, my — my favorite poet was Aeschylus, and he once wrote:
"Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God."
--Robert F. Kennedy, addressing a crowd on the night of Martin Luther King's assassination, 1968
________
"...When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.
And nobody will ever say 'Heil' to him, nor will they call him 'Führer' or 'Duce.'
But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of
'O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!'"
--American journalist Dorothy Thompson, 1935
"The sky starts at your feet. Think how brave you are to walk around."
--Anne Herbert, Space Colonies (1977)
"It turns out to be very difficult to devise a theory to describe the universe all in one go."
--Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
“Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world."
--Ben Okri (b. 1959), Nigerian writer
"Oh, there's nothing to worry about me...; the country is very safe and there are hardly any tigers here at all."
--Gabriel Veyre, French photographer, writing home from Cambodia, 1899
_________
"...it was equally certainly a pleasant turn of the populace which gave him
as sense of those normative letters the nickname
Here Comes Everybody.
...
from good start to happy finish
the truly catholic assemblage gathered together in that king's treat house of satin
alustrelike above floats and footlights..."
--James Joyce, Finnegan's Wake
_________
"Ask the next question."
--Theodore Sturgeon
_________
"Here's one of countless statistics that are liable to induce feelings akin to vertigo: on New Year's Day 1994... there were an estimated 623 websites. In total. On the whole internet."
--from "Forty years of the internet," by Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian, 23 October 2009.
_________
"No one therefore should try to know from me what I know I do not know--unless indeed it is to learn not to know something which he must eventually know to be beyond knowledge."
--Saint Augustine of Hippo
_________
"Whatever shines should be observed." (Quicquid nitet notandum.)
--William Herschel, 19th century astronomer
_________
"When you do your best, you’re depending to a large extent on your unconscious... because you’re waiting for the thing you can’t think of."
--Mike Nichols
_________
"An actress can only play a woman. I'm an actor, I can play anything."
—Whoopi Goldberg
_________
"I am not a number. I am a free man."
--"No. 6" (Patrick McGoohan), in The Prisoner
_________
"I am not a hippopotamus. I am a Moomin."
--Moomin (main character), by Tove Jansson
_________
"I'm a doctor, not an elevator."
--Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley), "Friday's Child" episode of Star Trek
_________
"Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atomsmashers, and a girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws."
-- S. J. Perelman
_________
"I don't think necessity is the mother of invention - invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble."
--Agatha Christie
_________
"No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft."
--H. G. Wells
_________
“Sing out the song of sorrow, song of grief, but let the good prevail.”
--Agamemnon, by Aeschylus
"To be thoroughly lazy is a tough job, but somebody has to do it. Industrious people build industry. Lazy people build civilization."
--Kazuaki Tanahashi, Brush Mind, Parallax Press, 1990
"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
--Martin Luther King, Jr.
"I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon taking it out."
--Gustave Flaubert
"Writing only leads to more writing."
--Colette
"If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster."
~Isaac Asimov
_________
"Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else."
--Gloria Steinem
_________
"The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion."
--Molly Ivins
_________
"Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are your own fears."
-- Rudyard Kipling
_________
"But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave."
--Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
_________
"There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer."
--Ansel Adams
_________
"A new commandment I give unto you, That you love one another as I have loved you."
--John 13:34
_________
"You may forget but let me tell you this: someone in some future time will think of us."
-- Sappho (about 2,700 years ago)
_________
"Although a life-long fashion dropout, I have absorbed enough by reading Harper's Bazaar while waiting at the dentist's to have grasped that the purpose of fashion it to make A Statement. My own modest Statement, discerned by true cognoscenti, is, 'Woman Who Wears Clothes So She Won't Be Naked.'"
--Molly Ivins
_________
"Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk."
--Henry David Thoreau
_________
"Silence is so accurate."
--Mark Rothko
_________
"All I want to do is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante."
--Samuel Beckett
_________
"We've got a date with destiny... and it looks like she ordered the lobster!"
--William Macy, The Shoveler in Mystery Men
_________
"... at times, one might almost believe that from the first dawn of consciousness throughout the ages, mankind has constantly been telling itself the same story, though with infinite variations, to the rhythm of its breath and pulse."
--Ivo Andric, Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech
_________
"Everyone's so horrid today, Uncle Arthur. Let's go out to tea."
--Minnie Beebe, in A Room with a View (film)
_________
The martini is "the only American invention as perfect as a sonnet."
--H. L. Mencken
_________
"The best antidote to bad speech is not censorship, but more speech."
--Nat Hentoff, journalist and civil libertarian
_________
"Whatever gets in the way of the work, is the work."
--Jason Shinder
_________
"Nothing is just one thing."
--Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
_________
"Eventually, everything connects."
--Charles Eames
_________
"I will follow you into serious darkness if there's even a promise of that moment when somebody realizes they can, in fact, still feel cherished by the right touch."
--Story by Story, blog on blogging, fanfic, writing, and all that good stuff
_________
"Only the mediocre are always at their best."
--Jean Giraudoux, French writer and diplomat (1882–1944)
_________
“The storyteller is deep inside every one of us... always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise ... but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us – for good and for ill.
It is our stories, the storyteller, that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, what we are at our best, when we are our most creative.”
--Doris Lessing
_________
"It ain't about Who you love. It's all about Do you love."
--Spearhead
_________
"We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us. We are here to ruin ourselves, and to break our hearts, and to love the wrong people, and, and to...die! The storybooks are bullshit."
--"Moonstruck" (Nicholas Cage, as Ronny Cammareri)
_________
"Commanding a starship is your first, best destiny. Anything else is a waste of material."
--Spock, "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan"
_________
"For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away."
--1 Peter 1:24, King James Bible
_________
"It ain't no sin to be glad you're alive."
--Bruce Springsteen, "Badlands"
_________
"Remember, it's never about you. Whatever you think, it's not about you."
--Hillary Clinton
_________
“The mind is much more like a muscle than we’ve ever realized. It needs to get cognitive exercise.”
--James Flynn, social scientist
_________
"...in the Quran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Quran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work."
---Jorge Luis Borges, on notwriting about the tango & gauchos, in "The Argentine Writer and Tradition"
"You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd."
--Flannery O'Connor
_________
"Everything is what it is because it got that way."
--D'Arcy Thompson, biologist, 1917
_________
"There are no switches, everything's a dial."
--Stuart Firestein, biology professor at Columbia University, speaking of the brain
_________
"It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing."
--Gertrude Stein
_________
"When [the farmer and her daughter] saw me in my space suit and the parachute dragging alongside as I walked, they started to back away in fear. I told them, don't be afraid, I am a Soviet like you, who has descended from space and I must find a telephone to call Moscow!"
--Yuri Gagarin, Soviet cosmonaut, on his return to Earth after his first space flight
_________
--Joan Juliet Buck
_________
"My favorite poem, my — my favorite poet was Aeschylus, and he once wrote:
"Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
until, in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God."
--Robert F. Kennedy, addressing a crowd on the night of Martin Luther King's assassination, 1968
________
"...When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.
And nobody will ever say 'Heil' to him, nor will they call him 'Führer' or 'Duce.'
But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of
'O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!'"
--American journalist Dorothy Thompson, 1935
__________
“They’ve moved me to a new office and I don’t like it at all . . . Different pigeons come to the windows.”_____________
--Barbara Pym, Excellent Women, published in 1952
“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive:
for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
--end of Middlemarch, by George Eliot
_________
_________
"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted.-- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.
Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.
It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. "
_________
BELOW, from Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Ernest:
JACK: How can you sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can't make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.
ALGERNON: Well, I can't eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.
___________
Every one ought to hold fast, not their faults, but their peculiarities....
We ought, indeed, to act in such a way as shall be in no respect repugnant to our common human nature; yet, holding this sacred, let us follow our individual nature, so that, if there are other pursuits in themselves more important and excellent, we yet may measure our own pursuits by the standard of our own nature.
For it is of no avail to resist nature, or to pursue anything which we cannot reach.
JACK: How can you sit there, calmly eating muffins when we are in this horrible trouble, I can't make out. You seem to me to be perfectly heartless.
ALGERNON: Well, I can't eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them.
___________
Every one ought to hold fast, not their faults, but their peculiarities....
We ought, indeed, to act in such a way as shall be in no respect repugnant to our common human nature; yet, holding this sacred, let us follow our individual nature, so that, if there are other pursuits in themselves more important and excellent, we yet may measure our own pursuits by the standard of our own nature.
For it is of no avail to resist nature, or to pursue anything which we cannot reach.
"The sky starts at your feet. Think how brave you are to walk around."
--Anne Herbert, Space Colonies (1977)
"It turns out to be very difficult to devise a theory to describe the universe all in one go."
--Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
“Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world."
--Ben Okri (b. 1959), Nigerian writer
"Oh, there's nothing to worry about me...; the country is very safe and there are hardly any tigers here at all."
--Gabriel Veyre, French photographer, writing home from Cambodia, 1899
_________
"...it was equally certainly a pleasant turn of the populace which gave him
as sense of those normative letters the nickname
Here Comes Everybody.
...
from good start to happy finish
the truly catholic assemblage gathered together in that king's treat house of satin
alustrelike above floats and footlights..."
--James Joyce, Finnegan's Wake
_________
"Ask the next question."
--Theodore Sturgeon
_________
"Here's one of countless statistics that are liable to induce feelings akin to vertigo: on New Year's Day 1994... there were an estimated 623 websites. In total. On the whole internet."
--from "Forty years of the internet," by Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian, 23 October 2009.
_________
"No one therefore should try to know from me what I know I do not know--unless indeed it is to learn not to know something which he must eventually know to be beyond knowledge."
--Saint Augustine of Hippo
_________
"Whatever shines should be observed." (Quicquid nitet notandum.)
--William Herschel, 19th century astronomer
_________
"When you do your best, you’re depending to a large extent on your unconscious... because you’re waiting for the thing you can’t think of."
--Mike Nichols
_________
"An actress can only play a woman. I'm an actor, I can play anything."
—Whoopi Goldberg
_________
"I am not a number. I am a free man."
--"No. 6" (Patrick McGoohan), in The Prisoner
_________
"I am not a hippopotamus. I am a Moomin."
--Moomin (main character), by Tove Jansson
_________
"I'm a doctor, not an elevator."
--Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley), "Friday's Child" episode of Star Trek
_________
"Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atomsmashers, and a girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws."
-- S. J. Perelman
_________
"I don't think necessity is the mother of invention - invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble."
--Agatha Christie
_________
"No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft."
--H. G. Wells
_________
“Sing out the song of sorrow, song of grief, but let the good prevail.”
--Agamemnon, by Aeschylus
"To be thoroughly lazy is a tough job, but somebody has to do it. Industrious people build industry. Lazy people build civilization."
--Kazuaki Tanahashi, Brush Mind, Parallax Press, 1990
"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."
--Martin Luther King, Jr.
"I spent the morning putting in a comma and the afternoon taking it out."
--Gustave Flaubert
"Writing only leads to more writing."
--Colette
"If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster."
~Isaac Asimov
_________
"Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else."
--Gloria Steinem
_________
"The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion."
--Molly Ivins
_________
"Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are your own fears."
-- Rudyard Kipling
_________
"But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave."
--Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
_________
"There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer."
--Ansel Adams
_________
"A new commandment I give unto you, That you love one another as I have loved you."
--John 13:34
_________
"You may forget but let me tell you this: someone in some future time will think of us."
-- Sappho (about 2,700 years ago)
_________
"Although a life-long fashion dropout, I have absorbed enough by reading Harper's Bazaar while waiting at the dentist's to have grasped that the purpose of fashion it to make A Statement. My own modest Statement, discerned by true cognoscenti, is, 'Woman Who Wears Clothes So She Won't Be Naked.'"
--Molly Ivins
_________
"Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk."
--Henry David Thoreau
_________
"Silence is so accurate."
--Mark Rothko
_________
"All I want to do is sit on my ass and fart and think of Dante."
--Samuel Beckett
_________
"We've got a date with destiny... and it looks like she ordered the lobster!"
--William Macy, The Shoveler in Mystery Men
_________
"... at times, one might almost believe that from the first dawn of consciousness throughout the ages, mankind has constantly been telling itself the same story, though with infinite variations, to the rhythm of its breath and pulse."
--Ivo Andric, Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech
_________
"Everyone's so horrid today, Uncle Arthur. Let's go out to tea."
--Minnie Beebe, in A Room with a View (film)
_________
The martini is "the only American invention as perfect as a sonnet."
--H. L. Mencken
_________
"The best antidote to bad speech is not censorship, but more speech."
--Nat Hentoff, journalist and civil libertarian
_________
"Whatever gets in the way of the work, is the work."
--Jason Shinder
_________
"Nothing is just one thing."
--Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
_________
"Eventually, everything connects."
--Charles Eames
_________
"I will follow you into serious darkness if there's even a promise of that moment when somebody realizes they can, in fact, still feel cherished by the right touch."
--Story by Story, blog on blogging, fanfic, writing, and all that good stuff
_________
"Only the mediocre are always at their best."
--Jean Giraudoux, French writer and diplomat (1882–1944)
_________
“The storyteller is deep inside every one of us... always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise ... but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us – for good and for ill.
It is our stories, the storyteller, that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, what we are at our best, when we are our most creative.”
--Doris Lessing
_________
"It ain't about Who you love. It's all about Do you love."
--Spearhead
_________
"We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us. We are here to ruin ourselves, and to break our hearts, and to love the wrong people, and, and to...die! The storybooks are bullshit."
--"Moonstruck" (Nicholas Cage, as Ronny Cammareri)
_________
"Commanding a starship is your first, best destiny. Anything else is a waste of material."
--Spock, "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan"
_________
"For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass. The grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away."
--1 Peter 1:24, King James Bible
_________
"It ain't no sin to be glad you're alive."
--Bruce Springsteen, "Badlands"
_________
"Remember, it's never about you. Whatever you think, it's not about you."
--Hillary Clinton
_________
“The mind is much more like a muscle than we’ve ever realized. It needs to get cognitive exercise.”
--James Flynn, social scientist
_________
"...in the Quran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Quran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work."
---Jorge Luis Borges, on notwriting about the tango & gauchos, in "The Argentine Writer and Tradition"
"You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd."
--Flannery O'Connor
_________
"Everything is what it is because it got that way."
--D'Arcy Thompson, biologist, 1917
_________
"There are no switches, everything's a dial."
--Stuart Firestein, biology professor at Columbia University, speaking of the brain
_________
"It takes a lot of time to be a genius. You have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing."
--Gertrude Stein
_________
"When [the farmer and her daughter] saw me in my space suit and the parachute dragging alongside as I walked, they started to back away in fear. I told them, don't be afraid, I am a Soviet like you, who has descended from space and I must find a telephone to call Moscow!"
--Yuri Gagarin, Soviet cosmonaut, on his return to Earth after his first space flight
_________