Quotes and poems
When did you surrender your freedom to communicate, something that was yours and yours alone, whether an email to a lover or a picture of your child? Ask yourself, do you feel safer now you know that you have no secrets? Now, the intimacies that are of no import to anyone but you have been subject to virtual extraordinary rendition. Because, fundamentally, your government does not trust you. Why therefore should you trust it?
Suzanne Moore
"Here's what I love about Dylan: He was exactly as you'd expect he would be. He wouldn't come to the rehearsal; usually, all these guys are practising before the set in the evening. He didn't want to take a picture with me; usually all the talent is dying to take a picture with me and Michelle before the show, but he didn't show up to that. He came in and played "The Times They Are A-Changin'." A beautiful rendition. The guy is so steeped in this stuff that he can just come up with some new arrangement, and the song sounds completely different. Finishes the song, steps off the stage — I'm sitting right in the front row — comes up, shakes my hand, sort of tips his head, gives me just a little grin, and then leaves. And that was it — then he left. That was our only interaction with him. And I thought: That's how you want Bob Dylan, right? You don't want him to be all cheesin' and grinnin' with you. You want him to be a little skeptical about the whole enterprise. So that was a real treat"
Barack Obama as reported in Rolling Stone Magazine
"Here's the news: I am going to sue the Brown and Williamson Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a billion bucks! Starting when I was only twelve years old, I have never chain-smoked anything but unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right on the package, Brown and Williamson have promised to kill me.
"But I am now eighty-one and a half!!!!
"Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon."
Kurt Vonnegut
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"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests."
Gore Vidal
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"Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
Samuel Beckett
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"I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here."
William Gibson, writer
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"I've been rejected by every morning show in America. You put me on live, I might ask questions like: 15 of the 19 [September 11] hijackers were from Saudi Arabia - and we bomb Afghanistan. What did we do? Miss?"
American writer Michael Moore explains why the U.S. press is not covering the launch of his new book, Stupid White Men
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"If a man does not know to what port he is steering, no wind is favourable to him."
Seneca (Lucius Annaeus Seneca)
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"If I let you drive me crazy, we`ll all starve. If I wring your neck, your mother and I can always produce a replacement."
George Jonas, about his father
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"Il y a plus affaire a interpreter les interpretations, qu'a interpreter les choses, et plus de livres sur les livres, que sur autre subject: nous ne faisons que nous entregloser. Tout fourmille de commentaires : d'autheurs, il en est grand cherte."
Michel de Montaigne, Essais III 13 (published in 1588)
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"It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop."
Vita Sackville-West
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"It is no accident that although Jesus came preaching a disturbing and redistributive gospel, we do not preach what Jesus preached. Instead, we preach Jesus."
Peter J. Gomes, minister of Harvard's Memorial Church and professor, criticizing the institutional church, from his new book The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus: What's So Good About the Good News?
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"It is wisest to always err on the side of life."
U.S. President George W. Bush, after signing the Schiavo Law on March 21, 2005
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"Its major importance would appear to be financial support of the surgical profession."
Alfred Sherwood Romer and Thomas S. Parsons, explaining the role of the human appendix, in The Vertebrate Body
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"Latin America is the insane asylum of Europe. Maybe, originally, it was thought that Latin America would be Europe's hospital, or Europe's grain bin. But now it's the insane asylum. A savage, impoverished, violent insane asylum, where, despite its chaos and corruption, if you open your eyes wide you can see the shadow of the Louvre."
Roberto Bolano, writer
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"Looking back at the age of eighty-eight over the fifty-seven years of my political work in England, knowing what I aimed at and the results, meditating on the history of Britain and the world since 1914, I see clearly that I achieved practically nothing. The world today and the history of the human anthill during the last fifty-seven years would be exactly the same as it is if I had played pingpong instead of sitting on committees and writing books and memoranda. I have therefore to make the rather ignominious confession to myself and to anyone who may read this book that I must have in a long life ground through between 150,000 and 200,000 hours of perfectly useless work."
Leonard Woolf, from The Journey Not the Arrival Matters
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"Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon."
Susan Ertz
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"Praise from a salesman, in my humble opinion, is one of life's less convincing compliments."
Peter Mayle
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"The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned beef hash with diced chiles, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of Key lime pie, two margaritas and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert. Right, and there should also be two or three newpapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours and at least one source of good music. All of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked."
Hunter S. Thompson on breakfast
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"The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes, in seeing the universe with the eyes of another, of hundreds of others, in seeing the hundreds of universes that each of them sees."
Marcel Proust
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"Treason is a matter of dates."
Talleyrand (Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord (1754-1838))
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"Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill."
Flann O'Brien
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"We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home."
Edward R. Murrow, journalist (1908-1965)
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"When you consider something like death, after which (there being no news flash to the contrary) we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably doesn't matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly. It probably doesn't matter if, while trying to be modest and eager watchers of life's many spectacles, we sometimes look clumsy or get dirty or ask stupid questions or reveal our ignorance or say the wrong think or light up with wonder like the children we all are. It probably doesn't matter if a passerby sees us dipping a finger into the moist pouches of dozens of lady's slippers to find out what bugs tend to fall into them, and thinks us a bit eccentric. Or a neighbor, fetching her mail, sees us standing in the cold with our own letters in one hand and a seismically red autumn leaf in the other, its color hitting our sense like a blow from a stun gun, as we stand with a huge grin, too paralyzed by the intricately veined gaudiness of the leaf to move."
Diane Ackerman, from A Natural History of the Senses
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"Women have babies; men try to replicate the experience by making Pinot Noir."
Wine writer Tony Aspler
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"You may already have noticed that girls are quite different from you. By this we do not mean the physical differences, more the fact that they remain unimpressed by your mastery of a game involving wizards, or your understanding of Morse code. Some will be impressed, of course, but as general rule, girls do not get quite as excited by the use of urine as a secret ink as boys do."
Conn Iggulden and Hal Iggulden, from The Dangerous Book for Boys
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In the Microscope
Here too are the dreaming landscapes,
lunar, derelict.
Here too are the masses,
tillers of the soil.
And cells, fighters
who lay down their lives for a song.
Here too are cemeteries,
fame and snow.
And I hear the murmuring,
the revolt of immense estates.
Miroslav Holub
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Love
Two thousand cigarettes.
A hundred miles
from wall to wall.
An eternity and a half of vigils
blanker than snow.
Tons of words
old as the tracks
of a platypus in the sand.
A hundred books we didn't write.
A hundred pyramids we didn't build.
Sweepings.
Dust.
Bitter
as the beginning of the world.
Believe me when I say
it was beautiful.
Miroslav Holub
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Basel, do you know what happens when you blow yourself up? You don`t go to heaven. You go into a hole in the ground, and you get covered up with dirt."
Rafiq Hamdouna, a former Fatah leader, to his son who said he wanted to be a martyr bomber. Quoted in The New Yorker, September 11, 2006
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Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,
And all the wheels of Being slow.
Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is rack'd with pangs that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging flame.
Be near me when my faith is dry,
And men the flies of latter spring,
That lay their eggs, and sting and sing
And weave their petty cells and die.
Be near me when I fade away,
To point the term of human strife,
And on the low dark verge of life
The twilight of eternal day.
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H. L.
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Bronx?
No thonx
Ogden Nash
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He is kissing her forever, she is kissing him goodbye (from "How the Nights Can Fly" by Bob Lind - my version sung by Richie Havens)
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There were no cuckoos, no sycamores
We played about the forest floor
Underneath the silver maples, the balsams and the sky
We popped the heads off dandelions
Assuming roles from nursery rhymes
Rested on the riverbank
And grew up by and by, and grew up by and by
(Anna McCarrigle - from Goin' back to Harlan, and the version that thrills me every time is Emmylou Harris's on Wrecking Ball)
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Her profession's her religion
Her sin is her lifelessness (from Bob Dylan's Desolation Row)
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It takes a very good drummer to be better than no drummer at all
(Mark Knopfler, after Chet Atkins)
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I love this breakfast thing. It's a novelty to me
(Keith Richards on collecting his Q Magazine Special Merit award at around 14:00)
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“I find it jars a little. After all, it was written for Marilyn Monroe. This is writing songs for dead blondes.”
(Keith Richards , in a 1997 interview with Toronto Sun writer Jane Stevenson commenting on Elton John's reworking of Candle in the Wind)
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Let's face it: Woodstock was created for wallets. It was designed to make bucks. And then the universe took over and did a little dance
Wavy Gravy - founder of the Hog Farm commune
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My son is listening to the exchange between me and the controller and wants to chime in on the conversation. I said to my son, "Just hang on; I will give you a chance". I never should have said that because now he is all excited to talk on the radio. As I start to turn inbound on the turn, the approach control said "Contact tower when established on the localizer". So I told my young Padawan Learner: "OK, when this needle gets here on the dial, push the radio button and tell the tower that 93 Romeo is inbound on the localizer".
Now imagine this, I am giving basic instrument instruction to a nine year old; I cannot get adults to say this during training. But before I can give him something simpler to say he keys the mike and says
"REBEL BASE, THIS IS RED 5. WE ARE STARTING OUR ATTACK RUN ON THE DEATH
STAR".
Good God!
Now this is post 9/11 and before I can key my mike and say anything, the tower jumps on and says "RED 5, YOU'RE CLEARED FOR THE APPROACH TO THE DEATH STAR. REPORTS HITS AWAY"
...
So you see. This is why I own my own aircraft. You cannot beat this kind of quality time with your kids. And there is no way you can put a price on that.
Jeff Bryant, Southwest Regional Director, Beech Aero Club.
[1975 X-Wing Fighter Model B-19, N6993R]
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So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years--
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
T.S. Eliot, East Coker, 2.V
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That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
---Those dying generations---at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.
II
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
III
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
IV
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Sailing to Byzantium - WB Yeats
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The city dissolves about us, and its walls
Are mountains of rock cruelly carved by wind.
Sand streams down their wasting sides, sand
Mounts upward slowly about them: foot and hand
We crawl and bleed among them! Is this Senlin?
In the desert of Senlin must we live and die?
We hear the decay of rocks, the crash of boulders,
Snarling of sand on sand. 'Senlin!' we cry.
'Senlin!' again . . . Our shadows revolve in silence
Under the soulless brilliance of blue sky.
From "Senlin: A Biography" by Conrad Aiken
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This is how it works
You're young until you're not
You love until you don't
You try until you can't
Regina Spektor - from On The Radio
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Those Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
Robert Hayden
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We had an apartment in the city,
Me and Loretta liked living there.
Well, it'd been years since the kids had grown,
A life of their own left us alone.
John and Linda live in Omaha,
And Joe is somewhere on the road.
We lost Davy in the Korean war,
And I still don't know what for, don't matter anymore.
(John Prine - 1st verse of Hello in There)
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The Ghost Moth
In late July the darkening lane
From earlier sun beningly warm
No stir of living thing attends
But for a single moonlit form
Along the hedge a Ghost Moth moves
Slowly he casts his censer swing
Unveering arc, impalpable
Floats up the slim illumined wing
Scanning the dim-seen foliage ere
Profounder night exclude all view
Softly he sheds his steady gleam
Adventuring the quiet dark through
So he bows out the dog-rose days
Itinerant charmer of our ways
Morton Marrian
(Note: The Ghost Swift Moth is notable for the fact that, whereas the female's flight is swift and direct, the male hovers in a slow pendulum-like movement, which, with its almost phosphorescent wings, suggests a haunting before the objects it faces in the dark)
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Mistah Kurz - he dead.
A penny for the Old Guy!
I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpieces filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rat's feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar.
Shape without form, shade without color,
Paralyzed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us - if at all - not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer-
Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom.
III
This is the dead land
This is the cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdom.
In the last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.
V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but with a whimper
(The Hollow Men - TS Eliot)
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If she comes up pregnant what'll she do
Forget the career, forget about school
Can she live on faith? live on hope?
High on Jesus or hooked on dope
When it's way too late to just say no
You can't make it here anymore
From "We can't make it here" by James McMurtry
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Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
From "Highway 61 Revisited" by Bob Dylan
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