there is no end

As usual I finish the day before the sea, sumptuous this evening beneath the moon, which writes Arab symbols with phosphorescent streaks on the slow swells. There is no end to the sky and the waters. How well they accompany sadness!

--  Albert Camus

Too bad you can't buy a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin real fast and freak everybody out.

-- Jack Handy

crumble

Some guy hit my fender and I said "be fruitful and multiply" but not in those words.
-- Woody Allen

new moon

When you love a man, he becomes more than a body. His physical limbs expand, and his outline recedes, vanishes. He is rich and sweet and right. He is part of the world, the atmosphere, the blue sky and the blue water.

--  Gwendolyn Brooks

you and me babe

Loyalty means nothing unless it has at its heart the absolute principle of self-sacrifice.

-- Woodrow T. Wilson

these faces, these.

Family faces are magic mirrors looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present, and future.

-- Gail Lumet Buckley

the mote in your brother's eye

Ordinary people think that talent must be always on its own level and that it arises every morning like the sun, rested and refreshed, ready to draw from the same storehouse -- always open, always full, always abundant -- new treasures that it will heap up on those of the day before; such people are unaware that, as in the case of all mortal things, talent has its increase and decrease, and that independently of the career it takes, like everything that breathes... it undergoes all the accidents of health, of sickness, and of the dispositions of the soul -- its gaiety or its sadness. As with our perishable flesh. talent is obliged constantly to keep guard over itself, to combat, and to keep perpetually on the alert amid the obstacles that witness the exercise of its singular power.

-- Eugene Delacroix

of thee I sing

We must declare ourselves, become known; allow the world to discover this subterranean life of ours which connects kings and farm boys, artists and clerks. Let them see that the important thing is not the object of love, but the emotion itself.

--  Gore Vidal

inclemency

The doom of a nation can be averted only by a storm of flowing passion, but only those who are passionate themselves can arouse passion in others.

-- Adolf Hitler

that which does not kill us

But, my dear sirs, when peace does come, you may call on me for any thing. Then will I share with you the last cracker, and watch with you to shield your homes and families against danger from every quarter.

-- William Tecumseh Sherman

bond

I love to hear a choir. I love the humanity to see the faces of real people devoting themselves to a piece of music. I like the teamwork. It makes me feel optimistic about the human race when I see them cooperating like that.

-- Paul McCartney

guidance

We must care about the world of our children and grandchildren, a world we may never see.

-- Bertrand Russell

into the woods

Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

bring it on

The wise man in the storm prays to God, not for safety from danger, but deliverance from fear.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

in the moment

Only when your consciousness is totally focused on the moment you are in can you receive whatever gift, lesson, or delight that moment has to offer.

-- Barbara De Angelis

we each

We are all primary numbers divisible only by ourselves.

-- Jean Guitton

there, and here

Perhaps it is our perennial fate to be surprised by the simultaneity of events, by the sheer extension of the world in time and space. That we are here, prosperous, safe, unlikely to go to bed hungry or be blown to pieces this evening, while elsewhere in the world, right now in Grozny, in Najaf, in the Sudan, in the Congo, in Gaza, in the favelas of Rio....

To be a traveler—and novelists are often travelers—is to be constantly reminded of the simultaneity of what is going on in the world, your world and the very different world you have visited and from which you have returned home.

-- Susan Sontag

holding on

The bravest thing that men do is love women.

-- Mort Sahl

dedicated to the one I love

Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.

-- Fred Rogers

life is but a dream

I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?

-- Chuang Tzu

indisposed

It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy;-- it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.

-- Jane Austen

I guess I just prefer to see the dark side of things. The glass is always half empty. And cracked. And I just cut my lip on it. And chipped a tooth.

-- Janeane Garofalo

this and that, and them

Pair off in threes.

-- Yogi Berra

trifling matters

One way to get high blood pressure is to go mountain climbing over molehills.

-- Earl Wilson

fleetly float

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

-- George Bernard Shaw

it is to see, or to not

That's the thing with magic. You've got to know it's still here, all around us, or it just stays invisible for you.

-- Charles de Lint

born again

Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.

-- R.D. Laing

low and slow

It was an instinct to put the world in order that powered her mending split infinitives and snipping off dangling participles, smoothing away the knots and bumps until the prose before her took on a sheen, like perfect caramel.

-- David Leavitt

wonked out

Round the world and home again
That's the sailor's way
Faster faster, faster faster
There's no earthly way of knowing
Which direction we are going
There's no knowing where we're rowing
Or which way the river's flowing
Is it raining, is it snowing
Is a hurricane a-blowing
Not a speck of light is showing
So the danger must be growing
Are the fires of Hell a-glowing
Is the grisly reaper mowing
Yes, the danger must be growing
For the rowers keep on rowing
And they're certainly not showing
Any signs that they are slowing

-- Roald Dahl

tippytoes

There's a magical tie to the land of our home, which the heart cannot break, though the footsteps may roam.

-- Eliza Cook

inconsequentiality

One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. Which road do I take? she asked. Where do you want to go? was his response. I don't know, Alice answered. Then, said the cat, it doesn't matter.

-- Lewis Carroll

upon the embracing

You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is an old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.

-- John Updike

the loss of innocence

There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.

-- Howard Zinn

down in back

Are we to paint what's on the face, what's inside the face, or what's behind it?

-- Pablo Picasso

walk this way

I'll walk where my own nature would be leading: It vexes me to choose another guide.

-- Emily Bronte

look differently

Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding. Find out what you already know and you will see the way to fly.

-- Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull

left alone

You shouldn't be told you're completely irresponsible and be left alone with too much medication. It's too easy to forget. You take a couple of sleeping pills and you wake up in twenty minutes and forget you've taken them. So you take a couple more, and the next thing you know you've taken too many.

--  Judy Garland

i will wait for you

I feel that there is reason lurking in you somewhere, so we will patiently grope round for it.

-- Arthur Conan Doyle, Sr.

in the end

The best portion of a good man's life is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.

-- William Wordsworth

apple turnovers

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

-- George Bernard Shaw

impermanence

Don't take life too seriously. It's only a temporary condition.

-- Bill Knapp

you go on ahead

I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.

-- Mitch Hedberg

incoming

They sicken of the calm, who know the storm.

-- Dorothy Parker

from some distance away

Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure.

--Henri Nouwen

her hands

All societies on the verge of death are masculine. A society can survive with only one man; no society will survive a shortage of women.

-- Germain Greer

alt shift

I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be.

-- Douglas Adams

catnip seriousity

They talk of the dignity of work. The dignity is in leisure.

-- Herman Melville

no crossing

A lot of Christians wear crosses around their necks. You think when Jesus comes back he ever wants to see a fucking cross? It's like going up to Jackie Onassis wearing a rifle pendant.

-- Bill Hicks

transitive rockwellianism

On rare occasions one does hear of a miraculous case of a married couple falling in love after marriage, but on close examination it will be found that it is a mere adjustment to the inevitable.

-- Emma Goldman

really, now

Physicists have determined that even the most solid and heavy mass of matter we see is mostly empty space. But at the submicroscopic level, specks of matter scattered through a vast emptiness have such incredible density and weight, and are linked to one another by such powerful forces, that together they produce all the properties of concrete, cast iron and solid rock. In much the same way, specks of knowledge are scattered through a vast emptiness of ignorance, and everything depends upon how solid the individual specks of knowledge are, and on how powerfully linked and coordinated they are with one another.

-- Thomas Sowell