"As a sorcerer, you've continually dealt with other
worlds and other dimensions...with the real as opposed to the unreal. It
should come as no surprise to you that there is no longer anything real in your
life!"
~ Dr. Strange, Marvel Comics
“Proverbs for Paranoids, 1: You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.”
“Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.”
“Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”
“Proverbs for Paranoids, 4: You hide, they seek.”
“Paranoids are not paranoids (Proverb 5) because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.”
~ Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
What
if all these fantasies
Come flailing around?
Now I’ve said… too much
~ R.E.M., Losing My Religion
Beyond the stars there are still other worlds;
There are other fields to test man’s indomitable spirit.
Not devoid of life are those open spaces of heaven;
There are hundreds of other caravans in them as well.
Do not remain contented with this sensible world;
Beyond it there are other gardens and nests as well.
If thou hast lost one nest, what then?
There are other places for sighing and wailing as well.
Thou art an eagle; thy business is to soar in the empyrean;
Thou hast other skies in which thou canst range as well.
Be not entangled in this world of days and nights;
Thou hast another time and space as well.
~ Muhammad Iqbal, Bal-e-Jibril
“I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don’t tell them the truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!”
~ Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire
“Information, what’s wrong with dope and women? Is it any wonder the world’s gone insane, with information come to be the only real medium of exchange?”
~ Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
“‘I suppose,’ thought Harriet, ‘she had one of those small, summery brains, that flower early and run to seed. ’”
~ Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night
“We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.”
~ Werner von Braun
“He was suffering from reader’s cramp, the inability to let go of books, an illness the scatological Dr. Freud never treated.”
~ Art Seidenbaum, Los Angeles Times
“Sure, understanding today’s complex world of the future is a lot like having bees live in your head.”
~ Firesign Theater, I Think We’re All Bozos on This Bus
“Poetry is that which is lost in translation.”
~ Robert Frost
“Some mornings it just doesn't seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps.”
~ Emo Philips
“There’s only two kinds of people in this world: my kind and assholes.”
~ John Waters, Pink Flamingos
“I used to be Snow White…but I drifted.”
~ Mae West
"You never know what is enough unless you know what is
more than enough."
~ William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
“It all goes back, of course, to Adam and Eve--a story which shows, among other things, that if you make a woman out of a man, you are bound to get into trouble.”
~ Carol Gilligan, In A Different Voice
“We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.”
~ Margaret Atwood
“The earth is degenerating these days. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer mind their parents and it is clear that the end of the world is at hand.”
~ Assyrian tablet, circa 2500 B.C.
“The unexamined life is not worth moving.”
~ Charles Nichols
“’What I need,’ shouted Ford, by way of clarifying his previous remarks, ‘is a strong drink and a peer-group.’”
~ Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe, and Everything
I look at the world and I notice it's turning
While my guitar gently weeps
With every mistake we must surely be learning
Still my guitar gently weeps
~ George Harrison (1943-2001)
“I love ideas as much as I love women. I derive a sensuous pleasure from playing with ideas. Genuine ideas dance and sing. They sparkle and twinkle with mirth and mischief. They titillate the mind, kindle the imagination, and warm the heart. They have grace and promise.”
~ Eric Hoffer, Between the Devil and the Dragon
“The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”
~William Faulkner
“I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.”
~ Elvis Presley
“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”
~ Oscar Wilde
“When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign-that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”
~ Jonathan Swift
“We trained hard-but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form into teams, we would be reorganized -- I was to learn later that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.”
~ Petronius
“Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana”
~ Anonymous
“God was my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.”
~ Seen on a t-shirt in Park City, Utah
“Luck and chance favor the prepared mind.”
~ Louis Pasteur
“Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.”
~ Jessamyn West
“The invention of the mousetrap does not date from our days. As soon as society invented the police, the police invented the mousetrap.”
~ Alexander Dumas, The Three Musketeers
“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in longshot.”
~ Charlie Chaplin
“I’ll tell you what the human soul is…it’s the part of you that knows when your brain isn’t working right.”
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Galapagos
“Don’t compromise yourself. You are all you’ve got.”
~ Janis Joplin
“Indeed, professional magicians claim that scientists, because of their confidence in their own objectivity, are easier to deceive than other people.”
~ William Broad and Nicholas Wade, Betrayers of Truth
“‘Actors,’ said Granny witheringly. ‘As if the world weren’t full of enough history without inventing more.’”
~ Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters
The first days are the hardest days
Don’t you worry any more
‘Cause when life looks like Easy Street
There is danger at your door.
~ Grateful Dead, Uncle John’s Band
“Ah, Brother, man’s a strangely fashioned creature
Who seldom is content to follow Nature,
But recklessly pursues his inclination
Beyond the narrow bounds of moderation,
And often, by transgressing Reason’s laws,
Perverts a lofty aim or noble cause.”
~ MoliPre, Tartuffe, Act I, Scene 5
--What’s optimism? said Cacambo.
--Alas, said Candide, it is a mania for saying things are well when one is in hell.
~ Voltaire, Candide
"...people will
forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never
forget how you made them feel."
“’Because you haven’t got magical brains,’ laughed Scraps the Patchwork girl. ‘Such brains as you have are of the common sort that grow in your heads, like weeds in a garden. I’m sorry for you people who have to be born in order to be alive.’”
~ L. Frank Baum, The Lost Princess of Oz
“The myth about communication is the mistaken belief that it has taken place.”
~ George Bernard Shaw
How long have I been sleeping?
How long have I been drifting along through the night?
How long have I been dreaming I could make it right
If I closed my eyes and tried with all my might
To be the one you need?
~ Jackson Browne, Late for the Sky
"Nobody can wholeheartedly do anything unless he
believes that his activity is important and good. Therefore, whatever a
man's position may be, he is bound to take that view of human life in general that will make his own
activity seem important and good. People usually imagine that a thief, a
murderer, a spy, a prostitute, knowing their occupation to be evil, must be
ashamed of it. But the very opposite is true. Men who have been
placed by fate and their own sins or mistakes in a certain position, however
irregular that position may be, adopt a view of life as a whole which makes
their position appear to them good and
respectable."
~ Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection
"Human beings are like rivers: the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy, or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man."
~ Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection
“I remain an historian, that is, a storyteller who tries to unfold the intricate plot woven by the actions of men, women and teenagers (these last must not be forgotten), whose desires are the motive power of history.”
~ Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for the light switch.
I want to water-ski
across the surface of the poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture confessions out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
~ Billy Collins, Introduction to Poetry
“I respect only those who resist me, but I cannot tolerate them.”
~ Charles de Gaulle, in The New York Times Magazine, May 12, 1968
"It is harder to ask the right questions than to find answers for the wrong questions."
Now for you and me it may not be that hard to reach our
dreams
But that magic feeling never seems to last
And while the future’s there for anyone to change, still you
know it seems
It would be easier sometimes to change the past
~ Jackson Browne, Fountain of Sorrow
“Eternity is a terrible thought. I’m mean, where’s it going to end?”
~ Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead
To-morrow is Saint Valentine's Day
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose, and donn'd his clothes,
And dupp'd the chamber door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.
By Gis and by Saint Charity,
Alack, and fie for shame!
Young men will do't, if they come to 't;
By cock, they are to blame.
Quoth she, before you tumbled me,
You promised me to wed.
So would I ha' done, by yonder sun,
An thou hadst not come to my bed.
~ Hamlet, Act IV,
Scene V
"Like all parents, my husband and I just do the best we can, and hold our breath, and hope we've set aside enough money to pay for our kids' therapy."
~ Michelle Pfeiffer
Starry, starry night
Portraits hung in empty halls
Frameless heads on nameless walls
With eyes that watch the world and can’t forget
Like the strangers that you’ve met
The ragged men in ragged clothes
The silver thorn, the bloody rose
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow
Now I think I know
What you tried to say to me
How you suffered for your sanity
How you tried to set them free
They would not listen
They’re not listening still
Perhaps they never will
~ Don McLean, Starry, Starry Night
"Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking."
~ John Maynard Keynes
"May blessings be upon the head of
Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books."
~ Thomas Carlyle
“I’ve got enough guilt to start my own religion.”
~ Tori Amos, Crucify
“Life isn't a support-system for art. It's the other way around.”
~ Stephen King, On Writing
In my opinion there’s nothing in
this world
Beats a ’52 Vincent and a red-headed
girl.
~ Richard Thompson, ’52 Vincent Black
Lightning
“Where is the knowledge that is lost in information? Where is the wisdom that is lost in knowledge?”
~ T.S. Eliot
“There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.”
- Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
“I believe that if ever I had to practice cannibalism, I might manage if there were enough tarragon around.”
~ James Beard
“Indeed, professional magicians claim that scientists, because of their confidence in their own objectivity, are easier to deceive than other people.”
~ William J. Broad and Nicholas Wade, Betrayers of Truth
“The weather was hot and sticky and the acid sting of the smog had crept as far west as Beverly Hills. From the top of Mulholland Drive you could see it leveled out all over the city like a ground mist. When you were in it, you could taste it and smell it and it made your eyes smart. Everybody was griping about it. In Pasadena, where stuffy millionaires holed up after Beverly Hills was spoiled for them by the movie crowd, the city fathers screamed with rage. Everything was the fault of the smog. If the canary wouldn't sing, if the milkman was late, if the Pekinese had fleas, if an old coot in a starched collar had a heart attack on the way to church, that was the smog.”
~ Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
Substitute you for my mum.
At least I’ll get my washing done…
~ Pete Townshend (The Who), Substitute
“Poetry is more philosophical and serious than history, for its statements are in the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
~ Aristotle
“If one man offers you democracy and another offers you a bag of grain, at what stage of starvation will you prefer the grain to the vote?”
~ Bertrand Russell
“There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as ‘moral indignation’, which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.”
~ Erich Fromm
“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression ‘As pretty as an airport.’”
~ Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
“History has numerous lessons to teach us, if we can only figure out which ones are going to be on the test.”
~ Geoff Nunberg, linguist
“The first rule of cooking and warfare is: Never take the lid off a boiling pot unless you also have a strategy for turning down the heat.”
~ Thomas Friedman, The New York Times [11/27/04]
We don’t receive wisdom: we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”
~ Marcel Proust
“Three minutes' thought would solve it, but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.”
~ A.E.Housman
“Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig.”
~ Mark Twain
“Half the problems of the world would be solved if people would just sit down and keep still.”
~ Calvin Coolidge
“To the greedy man, everybody that is in the way of his greed is vice incarnate.”
~ D.H. Lawrence, Etruscan Places
“Because a fool kills a nightingale with a stone, is he therefore greater than the nightingale?”
~ D.H. Lawrence, Etruscan Places
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
~ George Bernard Shaw
“Happiness is good health and a bad memory.”
~ Ingrid Bergman
“Words are our favored means of enforcing consensus; nothing inspires orthodoxy and purposeful unanimity of action so well as a finely crafted motto.”
~ Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life
[Updated 2/28/06]