Is there a "quote" thread yet???

[Kätzchen]

“Dawn in Mongolia was an amazing thing. In one instant, the horizon became a faint line suspended in the darkness, and then the line was drawn upward, higher and higher. It was as if a giant hand had stretched down from the sky and slowly lifted the curtain of night from the face of the earth. It was a magnificent sight, far greater in scale...than anything that I, with my limited human faculties, could fully comprehend.”

― Haruki Murakami

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

[Jean_TX]

A quote that I try to live by:

If you want to think about what’s important in life, think about death. As some wise soul once noted, nobody on their deathbed ever said, “Gee, I wish I had spent more time at the office” or “Gee, I wish I had won another award.”

(Originator unknown)

[homoe]

I can resist anything but temptation!

[~ocean]

"Liars share with those they deceive , the desire not to be deceived." Sissela Books

[Kent]

The truth shall set you free...

[Kätzchen]

"The question of race was like the power of the moon in my house. It's what made the river flow, the ocean swell, and the tide rise, but it was a silent power, intractable, indomitable, indisputable, and thus completely ignorable. Mommy kept us at a frantic living pace that left no time for the problem. We thrived on thought, books, music, and art, which she fed to us instead of food (pp. 94)" ~ James McBride, The Color of Water (2006).

[Jean_TX]

From a book by Michael Palmer:

I can't make myself be happy, but I can always make myself not be miserable.

[Cid]

Whatever follows "I am" will come looking for you."
Pastor Joel Osteen.

I love that. If you say "I am tired" that's what you'll feel. If you say "I am gaining energy every minute. That's what you'll attract. Gotta love that!

[Kätzchen]

"Being happy is not the only happiness,"

-- Alice Walker

[Kätzchen]

A heavy heart, Belovèd, have I borne
From year to year until I saw thy face,
And sorrow after sorrow took the place
Of all those natural joys as lightly worn
As the stringed pearls, each lifted in its turn
By a beating heart at dance-time. Hopes apace
Were changed to long despairs, till God's own grace
Could scarcely lift above the world forlorn
My heavy heart. Then thou didst bid me bring
And let it drop adown thy calmly great
Deep being! Fast it sinketh, as a thing
Which its own nature doth precipitate,
Which thine doth close above it, mediating
Betwixt the stars and the unaccomplished fate.

Sonnets from the Portuguese, XXV
-- Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

[Kätzchen]

"Originally the pottery wheel and the dancing scene were intended to be two separate scenes. But instead of stopping at the end of the pottery scene, a shirtless Patrick and Demi segued into dancing an erotically charged dance together to the strains of The Righteous Brothers' Unchained Melody... The Electricity between them dancing following the pottery scene was so electric that Jerry said, "We don't need love making - this is the love scene," -- Bruce Joel Rubin

(In, Patrick Swayze: One Last Dance, pp. 127, Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 2009).

[Kätzchen]

“You understand Teacher, don't you, that when you have a mother who's an angel and a father who is a cannibal king, and when you have sailed on the ocean all your whole life, then you don't know just how to behave in school with all the apples and ibexes.”

― Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking

[Kätzchen]

A Turn to the Right
A Little White Light

Let there be a season when no one rakes,
When all that has ever fallen can drift
with ordinary wings. Mithras, I hear you
out in the open, humming our favorite tune
through a leaf and a comb.
Lead us as if we were righteous
into the blue light of heaven,
where no one will forgive anyone
just in case it's condescending,
and we will love each other
to the withered toes.

-- Carolyn Reynolds Miller, from Rising and Falling (Lynx House Press: 2001).

[Kätzchen]

Yesterday, I spent part of my day reading literature authored by Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramesci:

Foucault, because he's got a way with understanding complex social anomalies: "...There is notone but many silences, and they are an intregal part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses,"
(In, The History of Sexuality 1: An Introduction, 1984).




and Gramsci, because of his doctrine of Hegemony: "...the rule of one class over another is not dependent on economic or physical power alone but on persuading the ruled to accept a system of beliefs belonging to the ruling class (James Joll, UK, 1977).

[Kätzchen]

"It is not possible to make a mistake," -- advice for a shy friend.


(found scribbled onto the bathroom stall door at Powell's Bookstore)

[Asari]

“He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

[Cin]

Originally Posted by Kätzchen

and Gramsci, because of his doctrine of Hegemony: "...the rule of one class over another is not dependent on economic or physical power alone but on persuading the ruled to accept a system of beliefs belonging to the ruling class (James Joll, UK, 1977).

This needs to be put on a bumper sticker, or maybe written in the sky on a continuous loop around the world.

[Kätzchen]

"If only the sun-drenched celebrities are being noticed and worshiped, then our children are going to have a tough time seeing the value in the shadows, where the thinkers, probers and scientists are keeping society together," -- Rita Dove.

[Kätzchen]

Found an interesting comment, made by a poster on an NPR article this morning, about that family from Arizona who were rescued at sea. Don't know if this will make anyone else smile, but I found myself smiling while reading the comments section. (Link to NPR article found ~>>> HERE)

Originally Posted by E Brittingham

People are incapable of understanding that not everyone wants to live in a subdivision, eat at the "Olive Garden", and waste their lives in front of the TV. When I left college and decided to wander the country tending bar where ever I wound up, everybody said I was crazy. When I opened my first restaurant, at 26 years of age, on little more than entirely unproven confidence in my own ability and about a third of the money I needed to do it right, everybody said I was crazy. When I sold the place 5 years later and bought open ended "Around the World Fare" tickets for myself and my girlfriend and took off without any idea where we'd wind up or when we'd be back, everybody said I was crazy. When I came home and decided to buy a fire damaged Victorian era house and strip it to the frame and rebuild it without a day's experience in construction, everybody said I was crazy. Now, I live in one of the nicest houses in town with my beautiful wife and daughter and, everybody thinks I've lived a fascinating life. You just have to shrug off the constant nay saying of doughy-bodied know-it-alls and hope that you are smart enough to survive by your own wits. The Gastonguay family obviously is not. But, good on them for taking a chance, even if it was motivated by religious lunacy.

[Kätzchen]

Burned Forest
~ Nichita Stãnescu

Black snow was falling. The tree line
shone when I turned to see -
I had wondered long and silent,
alone, trailing memory behind me.

And it seemed the stars, fixed as they were,
ground their teeth, a stiffened nexus,
an infernal machine, tolling
the halted hours of conciousness.

Then, a thick silence descends,
and my every gesture
leaves a comet tail in the heavens.

And I hear evey glance I cast
as it echoes against
some tree.

Child, what were you seeking there,
with your gangly arms and pointed shoulders
on which the wings were barely dry -
black snow drifting in the evening sky.

A horizon howling, far from view,
darting its tongues and anthracite,
dragged me forever down the mute row,
my body, half naked, sliding from sight.

In distances of smoke the town afire,
blazing beneath the planes, a frigid pyre.
We two, forest, what did we do?
Why did they burn you, forest, in a toga of ash -
and the moon no longer passes over you?

From the book "Bas-Relief with Heroes"
english translation by Thomas Carlson and Vasile Poenaru.