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Showing posts from 2013
“Screws fall out all the time, the world’s an imperfect place.” - John Bender, The Breakfast Club

Dreams

Hold fast to dreams, For if dreams die, Life is a broken-winged bird That cannot fly. Hold fast to dreams. For if dreams go, Life is a barren field Covered with snow.  ~Langston Hughes

Passers-by

One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever came to sit by it. Passers-by see only a wisp of smoke from the chimney and continue on their way. ~ Vincent van Gogh

1984

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. ~ 1984 (George Orwell)
Why then, O browling love! O loving hate! O any thing, of nothing first create! O heavy lightness, serious vanity, misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms, feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health, still-weaking sleep, that is not what it is! This love feel I, that feel no love in this. Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet (I,1)

Answers!

Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise. ~ John W. Tukey, 1962

Sweet oblivious antidote

Macbeth: How does your patient, doctor? Doctor: Not so sick, my lord, as she is troubled with thick-coming fancies that keep her from rest. Macbeth: Cure her of that! Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with some sweet oblivious antidote cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon her heart. Doctor: Therein the patient must minister to himself. ~ Macbeth (William Shakespeare)

The treachery of human body

It was at night that they came for you, always at night. The proper thing was to kill yourself before they got you. Undoubtedly some people did so. Many of the disappearances were actually suicides. But it needed desperate courage to kill yourself in a world where firearms, or any quick and certain poison, were completely unprocurable. He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed. He might have silenced the dark-haired girl if only he had acted quickly enough: but precisely because of the extremity of his danger he had lost the power to act. It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one's own body. Even now, in spite of the gin, the dull ache in his belly made consecutive thought impossible. And it is the same, he perceived, in all seemingly heroic or tragic

A dream

Suddenly he was standing on short springy turf, on a summer evening when the slanting rays of the sun gilded the ground. The landscape that he was looking at recurred so often in his dreams that he was never fully certain whether or not he had seen it in the real world. In his waking thoughts he called it the Golden Country. It was an old, rabbit-bitten pasture, with a foot-track wandering across it and a molehill here and there. In the ragged hedge on the opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were swaying very faintly in the breeze, their leaves just stirring in dense masses like women's hair. Somewhere near at hand, though out of sight, there was a clear, slow-moving stream where dace were swimming in the pools under the willow trees. ~1984 (George Orwell)

Words

'It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take "good", for instance. If you have a word like "good", what need is there for a word like "bad"? "Ungood" will do just as well -- better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of "good", what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like "excellent" and "splendid" and all the rest of them? "Plusgood" covers the meaning, or "doubleplusgood" if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. but in the final ver

Curious emotion

A curious emotion stirred in Winston's heart. In front of him was an enemy who was trying to kill him: in front of him, also, was a human creature, in pain and perhaps with a broken bone. Already he had instinctively started forward to help her. In the moment when he had seen her fall on the bandaged arm, it had been as though he felt the pain in his own body. 'You're hurt?' he said. 'It's nothing. My arm. It'll be all right in a second.' She spoke as though her heart were fluttering. She had certainly turned very pale. 'You haven't broken anything?' 'No, I'm all right. It hurt for a moment, that's all.' She held out her free hand to him, and he helped her up. She had regained some of her colour, and appeared very much better. 'It's nothing,' she repeated shortly. 'I only gave my wrist a bit of a bang. Thanks, comrade!' And with that she walked on in the direction in which she had been goin

Absence

O friend! O best of friends! Thy absence more Than the impending night darkens the landscape o'er! ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The Old Astronomer

Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light. I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night. ~ Sarah Williams ( Poem: The Old Astronomer )

If you forget me

I want you to know one thing. You know how this is: if I look at the crystal moon, at the red branch of the slow autumn at my window, if I touch near the fire the impalpable ash or the wrinkled body of the log, everything carries me to you, as if everything that exists, aromas, light, metals, were little boats that sail toward those isles of yours that wait for me. Well, now, if little by little you stop loving me I shall stop loving you little by little. If suddenly you forget me do not look for me, for I shall already have forgotten you. If you think it long and mad, the wind of banners that passes through my life, and you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have roots, remember that on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my arms and my roots will set off to seek another land. But if each day, each hour, you feel that you are destined for me with implacable sweetness, if each day a flower climbs up to your lips to seek

Soldiers

Commander Shears to Nurse: You give me powders, pills, baths, injections, enemas; when all I need is love. ~ The Bridge on the River Kwai (Film)

Quotations

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. ~ Oscar Wilde

Different

The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. . . . Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you. ~ Catcher in the rye, by  J.D.Salinger

Grief

You cannot die of grief, though it feels as if you can. A heart does not actually break, though sometimes your chest aches as if it is breaking. Grief dims with time. It is the way of things. There comes a day when you smile again, and you feel like a traitor. How dare I feel happy. How dare I be glad in a world where my father is no more. And then you cry fresh tears, because you do not miss him as much as you once did, and giving up your grief is another kind of death. ~ A stroke of midnight , by Laurell K. Hamilton

Shadows

'Unless you learn to face your own shadows, you will continue to see them in others, because the world outside you is only a reflection of the world inside you'

The Best

"The best kind of love is the kind that weakens the soul and makes us reach for more; plants fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds" - The notebook

Our Deepest Fear

“ Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. ” -Marianne Williamson

Love

'To love another person is to see the face of God' -Les Miserables

The Greatest of all.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing. Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Love never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that w

Wallflower

S: Why do I and everyone I love pick people who treat us like we're nothing? C: We accept the love we think we deserve. ~ The perks of being a wallflower (Film)

A fool

There's a time when a man needs to fight, and a time when he needs to accept that his destiny is lost... the ship has sailed and only a fool would continue. Truth is... I've always been a fool. ~ Big Fish (Film)

Fish

There are some fish that cannot be caught. It's not that they're faster or stronger than other fish. They're just touched by something extra. ~ Big Fish (Film)