Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[BenG]

Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will.

— James Stephens, The Crock of Gold

[bfisher]

Lester Young slowly dying of malnutrition and alcohol:

"He ate almost nothing, but he still had his preferences when it came to food: Chinese was his favorite, that was the food he didn't eat most of."

"He was disappearing, fading into the tradition before he was even dead... When he played now cats said he limped along after himself, a pale imitation of those who played like him... He'd been thrown out of the Fletcher Henderson band for not sounding enough like Hawk. Now he was being thrown out of his own life for not sounding enough like himself."

Geoff Dyer - "but beautiful: a book about jazz"

[gmw]

I experienced a similar sense of the despondency when reading about the construction of the Pentagon Memorial dedicated to the 184 victims killed at the Pentagon and on American Airlines Flight 77 on 9/11. Its builders confidently predicted that it would last over a century. Think about that: a memorial that will last only a little longer than the life span of a healthy person. What is the point of a memorial that will mostly be viewed by contemporaries who already have firm recollections of the tragic event it memorializes? Compare this to the many bronze and granite memorials in our nation's capital built in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that will, like their Roman and Greek predecessors, probably endure millennia. Such are the values of this world we have created, one in which we have come to accept the short life expectancy of not only our infrastructure but of our memorials as well.

-- Robert Courland - Concrete Planet: The Strange and Fascinating Story of the World's Most Common Man-Made Material

[Angst]

the half-finished bottles of inspiration lie like ghosts in my room.

--Blue Rodeo - Til I Am Myself Again

[pomposity]

Eumelos had a Maltese dog.
He called him Bull. He was the most
Loyal dog that ever lived.
His bark comes faintly up from Hell,
Lost on the night-bound roads.

(from Kenneth Rexroth's translated Poems From The Greek Anthology)

[AlexBell]

... those among us who soonest recover from the shock of a great grief for the dead are those who have the most duties to perform toward the living... Time may claim many victories, but not the victory over grief. The great consolation for the loss of the dead who are gone is to be found in the great necessity of thinking of the living who remain.

The Dead Secret, by Wilkie Collins

[covingtoncat73]

You can depend on Rust Cohle to be cheery. He talks like a dark, hopeless version of Joseph Campbell.

"I think human consciousness, is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight - brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal."
~Matthew McConaughey as Rust Cohle in True Detective

[covingtoncat73]

Orson: The report, Mork.
Mork: This week I discovered a terrible disease called loneliness.
Orson: Do many people on Earth suffer from this disease?
Mork: Oh yes sir, and how they suffer. One man I know suffers so much he has to take a medication called bourbon, even that doesn't help very much because then he can hear paint dry.
Orson: Does bed rest help?
Mork: No because I've heard that sleeping alone is part of the problem. You see, Orson, loneliness is a disease of the spirit. People who have it think that no one cares about them.
Orson: Do you have any idea why?
Mork: Yes sir you can count on me. You see, when children are young, they're told not to talk to strangers. When they go to school, they're told not to talk to the person next to them. Finally when they're very old, they're told not to talk to themselves, who's left?
Orson: Are you saying Earthlings make each other lonely?
Mork: No sir I'm saying just the opposite. They make themeslves lonely, they're so busy looking out for number one that there's not enough room for two.
Orson: It's too bad everybody down there can't get together and find a cure.
Mork: Here's the paradox sir because if they did get together, they wouldn't need one. Isn't that zenlack?

[covingtoncat73]

Here is one of my favorite GOT quotes and apropos to world events...


“Oberyn wanted vengeance for Elia. Now the three of you want vengeance for him. I have four daughters, I remind you. Your sisters. My Elia is fourteen, almost a woman. Obella is twelve, on the brink of maidenhood. They worship you, as Dorea and Loreza worship them. If you should die, must El and Obella seek vengeance for you, then Dorea and Loree for them? Is that how it goes, round and round forever? I ask again, where does it end? I saw your father die. Here is his killer. Can I take a skull to bed with me, to give me comfort in the night? Will it make me laugh, write me songs, care for me when I am old and sick?”
- Ellaria to Obara, Nymeria, and Tyene Sand

[bfisher]

"The May that I was seventeen, I read “Middlemarch” in the space of two weeks, a reminder of how little else there was to do in my narrow English coastal town. The Wildean boyfriend lived, exotically enough, in distant London, a useful arrangement if one is developing a taste for nineteenth-century novels."

Rebecca Mead "The Pleasure of Reading to Impress Yourself" , The New Yorker, Aug.13

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cul...ure-of-reading

[BenG]

"I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that."
–Lauren Bacall

[covingtoncat73]

/Graffiti in the French Quarter.

[Angst]

If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.

--Benjamin Franklin

[bfisher]

If I have learned one thing in my fifty-four years, it is that it is very good for the character to engage in sports which put your life in danger from time to time. It breeds a saneness in dealing with day to day trivialities which probably cannot be got in any other way, and a habit of quick decisions. - Slide Rule by Nevil Shute.

[pilotbob]

In his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, astronomer Carl Sagan related his thoughts on a deeper meaning of the photographs Voyager took of Earth from the egde of the solar system:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

—Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1997 reprint, pp. xv–xvi