Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[kennyc]

The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.
- William Arthur Ward

[Angst]

Wishes cost nothing unless you want them to come true.

— Frank Tyger

[astrangerhere]

It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.

Julian Barnes | The Sense of an Ending

[kennyc]

I've had that on my TBR list for a while now.

[kennyc]

One of my most favorite poems - the Goodreads quote today as today is William Blake's birthday:


To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

- William Blake (The English poet was born on this day in 1757)

[sparklemotion]

Originally Posted by kennyc

One of my most favorite poems - the Goodreads quote today as today is William Blake's birthday:


To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

- William Blake (The English poet was born on this day in 1757)

So lovely. I love Blake.

[astrangerhere]

I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.

Raymond Chandler | The Simple Art of Murder

“I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won't.” Mark Twain. Happy 177th Samuel Clemens.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Hamlet53

“I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won't.” Mark Twain. Happy 177th Samuel Clemens.

[astrangerhere]

“You know what I think?" she says. "That people's memories are maybe the fuel they burn to stay alive. Whether those memories have any actual importance or not, it doesn't matter as far as the maintenance of life is concerned. They're all just fuel. Advertising fillers in the newspaper, philosophy books, dirty pictures in a magazine, a bundle of ten-thousand-yen bills: when you feed 'em to the fire, they're all just paper.”

Haruki Murakami | After Dark

[kennyc]

Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.

- Bill Bryson
The author of A Short History of Nearly Everything was born on this day in

[kennyc]

From one of my favorite books:

“But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it. As soon as you get a problem in any one of them, the solution it gives is always to go deeper into the same system. They're all in rather uneasy truce with one another in what's actually a mortal battle. Like all self-reinforcing systems. At best, each is trying to encompass the other two and define them as sub-groups. You know: religion and art are both forms of madness and madness is the realm of psychiatry. Or, art is the study and praise of man and man's ideals, so therefore a religious experience just becomes a brutalized aesthetic response and psychiatry is just another tool for the artist to observe man and render his portraits more accurately. And the religious attitude I guess is that the other two are only useful as long as they promote the good life. At worst, they all try to destroy one another. Which is what my psychiatrist, whether he knew it or not, was trying, quite effectively, to do to my painting. I gave up psychiatry too, pretty soon. I just didn't want to get all wound up in any systems at all.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren

[kennyc]

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
- C.S. Lewis

[gmw]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
- C.S. Lewis

Yes. And isn't it just great.

[kennyc]

One of my all time favorites, I kept it on the cover of my writing notebook for a long, long time:

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
- Gustave Flaubert