Passing passages

Not to contradict your dear old mom, who’s both wicked smart and wonderful, but, no, we don’t have to be realistic. Not when it comes to love. ~ Hank Moody, Californication (TV show)

Do whatever you have to do. Beg, plead, cry. Get down on bended knee. ’cause I’m telling you, no amount of top-shelf pussy can compete with the love of a good woman. ~ Hank Moody, Californication (TV show)

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken. ~ Oliver Cromwell (to the Church of Scotland, 1650) PS: prior probabilities.

The discipline of writing something down is the first step to making it happen. In conversation you can get away with all kinds of vagueness, often without realizing it. But there's something about putting your thoughts on paper that forces you to get down to the specifics. That way it's harder to deceive yourself or anybody else. ~ Lee Iococca

Maybe love won't let you down. All of your failures are training grounds and just as your back's turned you'll be surprised...as your solitude subsides. W. Shakespeare  I hold this to be the higher task for a bond between two people: that each protect the solitude of the other.  R.M. Rilke  Talent develops in solitude, character develops in the stream of life. W. Goethe

I told myself: "There must be people whose job it is to use the right words, put things in a way... who when their heart beats, can get other people's hearts to beat." "That day I decided to become a poet." ~ Le tigre et la neige (Film)

If she dies, they can close this whole show of a world... they can cart it off, unscrew the stars, roll up the sky and put it on a truck, they can turn off this sunlight I love so much. Do you know why I love it so much? Because I love her when the sun shines on her. They can take everything away, these carpets, columns, houses, sand, wind, frogs, ripe watermelons, hail, seven in the evening, May, June, July, basil, bees, the sea, courgettes... ~ Le tigre et la neige (Film)

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? … we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. ~ Franz Kafka

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

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

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

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)

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

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)

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...

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)

'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...

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...

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