Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[covingtoncat73]

Originally Posted by kennyc

"Truth is a matter of the imagination."
— Ursula K. Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness (Hainish Cycle #4))

Her Birthday today. Read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas:

http://harelbarzilai.org/words/omelas.txt

and from a commencement address at Mills College:

"Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you're weak where you thought yourself strong. You'll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself — as I know you already have — in dark places, alone, and afraid.

"What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign."

I tried to Karma you but, apparently, I've got to K someone else first because I've Karma'd you too much.

[covingtoncat73]

A little late for back-to-school, but... “I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

[covingtoncat73]

And another Le Guin, to compliment Kenny's...

"People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within."
— Ursula K. Le Guin (The Wave in the Mind: Talks & Essays on the Writer, the Reader & the Imagination)

[kennyc]

"He seemed to see, with a cartographer's eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county. He had made a discovery, a contribution to modern geography; he would name the stream Lucinda after his wife. [...] Making his way home by an uncommon route gave him the feeling that he was a pilgrim, an explorer, a man with a destiny, and he knew that he would find friends all along the way; friends would line the banks of the Lucinda River."
-- from The Swimmer by John Cheever

[kennyc]

"No, you’re wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it."
— John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath)

[victauria]

I was born to catch dragons in their dens
And pick flowers
To tell tales and laugh away the morning
To drift and dream like a lazy stream
And walk barefoot across sunshine days.

-- James Kavanaugh (Sunshine Days and Foggy Nights)

[covingtoncat73]

"Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony." Lou Reed

[covingtoncat73]

“Rock & Roll is so great, people should start dying for it. You don't understand. The music gave you back the beat so you could dream. A whole generation running with a Fender bass...

The people just have to die for the music. People are dying for everything else, so why not the music? Die for it. Isn't it pretty? Wouldn't you die for something pretty?

Perhaps I should die. After all, all the great blues singers did die. But life is getting better now.

I don't want to die. Do I? - Lou Reed (1965-1968)”
― Legs McNeil, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by covingtoncat73

"Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony." Lou Reed

Sleep Well Sweet Jane!

as an aside, Denis Johnson's title for his short story collection Jesus' Son was taken from Lou Reed's song 'Heroin'

“I knew every raindrop by its name.”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son

[kennyc]

We are stardust, we are golden and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden.
- Joni Mitchell

[Billi]

Woodstock?

[WT Sharpe]

.....If a football field were a timeline of cosmic history, cavemen to now spans the thickness of a blade of grass in the end zone
..........— Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958 - ), American astrophysicist, author, director of the Hayden Planetarium, and popular multi-media personality. Via Twitter, 5 November 2013.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

.....If a football field were a timeline of cosmic history, cavemen to now spans the thickness of a blade of grass in the end zone
..........— Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958 - ), American astrophysicist, author, director of the Hayden Planetarium, and popular multi-media personality. Via Twitter, 5 November 2013.

(and yes billi that's from her song woodstock - her poetry is incredible!)

[BenG]

Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we cannot, as well as sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are wavelengths of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste. Why then, given our brains wired the way they are, does the remark "Perhaps there are thoughts we cannot think," surprise you? Evolution, so far, may possibly have blocked us from being able to think in some directions; there could be unthinkable thoughts.

Richard Hamming, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in The American Mathematical Monthly 87, February 1980

[WT Sharpe]

Another November 5, 2013 Twitter tweet from Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson). He seems to have been on a football kick that day:
.....If a football at the 50 yd line were the Sun, how far is the Oort Cloud? // 400 mi away. Earth? The 35 yd line.