Leonard Cohen, I’m Your Man

I found that things got a lot easier when I no longer expected to win….

Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. 

Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance

Habit is necessary; but it is the habit of having careless habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.

(via James Clear)

 

Sylvia Plath, “Mad Girl’s Love Song”

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

W. H. Auden, Musee de Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window
or just walking dully along…

Clyde Barrow, letter to Henry Ford, from Letters of Note

Clyde Barrow to Henry Ford, 10th April 1934

While I still have got breath in my lungs I will tell you what a dandy car you make. I have drove Fords exclusively when I could get away with one. For sustained speed and freedom from trouble the Ford has got every other car skinned and even if my business hasn't been strictly legal it don't hurt anything to tell you what a fine car you got in the V8.

Clyde Barrow³
Letter to Henry Ford
10th April 1934

https://blinkingtwelve.blogspot.com

Mike Tyson

Everybody has a plan, until they get punched in the mouth.

John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel (East of Eden)

I feel just worthless today. I have used every physical excuse not to work except fake illness. I have dawdled, gone to the toilet innumerable times, had many glasses of water. Really childish. I dread the next scene, dread it like hell. 

Tyler Cowen's first law (Marginal Revolution)

There is something wrong with everything.

  — Tyler Cowen

There is something wrong with everying.

— Margalo Goldbach, not applying it as a law

 

Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction (via Samuel L. Jackson)

If my answers frighten you, Vincent, then you should cease asking scary questions.

Toni Morrison in keynote 1981

We don't need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writers movement—assertive, militant, pugnacious.

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons Dangereux

You'll find the shame is like the pain, you only feel it once.

— Marquise de Merteuil

 

Marie Kondo, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up

To truly cherish the things that are important to you, 

you must first discard those that have outlived their purpose.

General James Mattis, Former United States Secretary of Defense

Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everyone you meet.

John Mulaney on Netflix Is a Joke

I don't even know what my body is for — besides taking my head from room to room.

John O’Hara, Letter to The New Yorker editor Harold Ross - 1939

I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money.

T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding", The Four Quartets

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

Warren Buffet quoting his friend Tom, a Book of Mentors

Forty years ago, Tom gave me one of the best pieces of advice I've ever received. He said, "Warren, you can always tell someone to go to hell tomorrow." It's such an easy way of putting it. You haven't missed the opportunity. Just forget about it for a day.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled By Randomness

I detest the random use of borrowed wisdom.

Raymond Chandler, “Requiem”

There is a moment after death, yet hardly a moment,

When the bright clothes hang in the scented closet

And the lost dream fades and slowly fades,

When the silver bottles and the glass and the empty mirror,

And three long hairs in a brush and a folded kerchief,

And the fresh made bed and the fresh, plump pillows

On which no head will lie,

Are all that is left of the long, wild dream.

Sean Thomas Dougherty, "Why Bother"

Because right now, there is someone

out there with

a wound in the exact shape

of your words

Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

When a man clothed by the state pursues a man in rags, it is in order to make of him a man who is also clothed by the state. Only, the whole question lies in the color. 

Margalo's pitches for senior quote

 I want to thank my chiropractor for always having my back.

I want to thank my nail tech for always holding my hand.

I want to thank my massage therapist for always making me feel kneaded.

Tenor saxophonist Al Cohn [via Brian Chellas]

A gentle­man is someone who knows how to play an accordion, but doesn't.

Attributed to Henry Thoreau in Elmore Leonard, Cat Chaser [via Brian Chellas]

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

Lady Astor and Winston Churchill

LADY ASTOR: If I were married to you, I'd put poison in your coffee.

WINSTON CHURCHILL: If you were my wife, I'd drink it.

From Wilder, You All Spoken Here [via Brian Chellas]

If brains were dynamite he wouldn't have enough to blow his nose.

 

            If a bird had his brains he'd fly backwards.

 

            He's so ugly no fly'd ever land on him.

 

            Looks like he's been chewin' tobacco and spittin' in the wind.

 

            When he was a baby he was so ugly they fed him with a slingshot.

 

            She's so fat that if she had to haul ass she'd have to make two trips.

 

            [As tearful as] a child that's lost his chewing gum on a henhouse floor.

 

                        

Dean Acheson [via Brian Chellas]

Don't just do something, stand there.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, House of Seven Gables [via Brian Chellas]

The sick in mind, and, perhaps, in body, are rendered more darkly and hopelessly so, by the manifold reflection of their disease, mirrored back from all quarters, in the deportment of those about them; . . . 

Ecclesiastes, 12:12 [via Brian Chellas]

. . . be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.

 

Burma Shave ad [via Brian Chellas]

She kissed the hairbrush / by mistake. / She thought it was / her husband Jake.

 

Burma Shave ad [via Brian Chellas]

No lady likes / to dance or dine / accompanied by / a porcupine.

de Palfrey, in John le Carre, The Russia House [via Brian Chellas]

Just the usual triumph of the fattest, disguised as a rational deduction.

 

Sherlock Holmes, in Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Copper Beeches” [via Brian Chellas]

Crime is common. Logic is rare.

Saint Augustine, Confessions, book 4, chapter 6 [via Brian Chellas]

I was at the same time thoroughly tired of living and extremely frightened of dying.

Werner Herzog, Every Man for Himself and God Against All

Be strong, be smart, bring your toothbrush, be kind, work hard, be beautiful.

Werner Herzog, A Guide for the Perplexed

Read, read, read, read, read.

F Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

 The charm of knowledge would be small, were it not so much shame has to be overcome on the way to it.

Louise Gluck, “A Slip of Paper”

To get born, your body makes a pact with death,  

and from that moment, all it tries to do is cheat—    

You get into bed alone. Maybe you sleep, maybe you never wake up.  

But for a long time you hear every sound.  

It's a night like any summer night; the dark never comes.   

Louise Gluck, “A Slip of Paper”

No one taught me how to care for my body.  

You grow up watched by your mother or grandmother.  

Once you're free of them, your wife takes over, but she's nervous,  

she doesn't go too far. So this body I have,  

that the doctor blames me for—it's always been supervised by women,  

and let me tell you, they left a lot out.

Seamus Heaney, The Cure at Troy (after Sophocles)

[…]

History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there's fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
It means once in a lifetime
That justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.

WH Auden, September 1, 1939



I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright 
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can 
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Siri Hustvedt, The Delusions of Certainty

We are born of someone, but we do not die in pairs. 

Reverend Lovejoy to Ned Flanders in The Simpsons (S8, E8, written by Steve Young)

Ned Flanders: Reverend, I need to know - is God punishing me?

Reverend Lovejoy: Oooohh… Short answer, 'yes' with an 'if'. Long answer 'no' with a 'but'.

Erykah Badu in conversation with Austin Kleon

My biggest fear is the same as my biggest hope: That I am seen.

Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

Cosette was, moreover, passing through that dangerous period, the fatal phase of feminine reverie abandoned to itself, in which the isolated heart of a young girl resembles the tendrils of the vine which cling, as chance directs, to the capital of a marble column or to the post of a wine-shop: A rapid and decisive moment, critical for every orphan, be she rich or poor, for wealth does not prevent a bad choice; misalliances are made in very high circles, real misalliance is that of souls; and as many an unknown young man, without name, without birth, without fortune, is a marble column which bears up a temple of grand sentiments and grand ideas, so such and such a man of the world satisfied and opulent, who has polished boots and varnished words, if looked at not outside, but inside, a thing which is reserved for his wife, is nothing more than a block obscurely haunted by violent, unclean, and vinous passions; the post of a drinking-shop.

Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

There are meditations which may be called vertical; when one is at the bottom of them, time is required to return to earth.

Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

The world turns. But luckily, if it falls, it breaks.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Because from much further back I had had to face certain difficulties, until I decided to accept the fact that a man must be what he is, life must be lived as it is, and you cannot live at all if you do not learn to adapt yourself to your life as it happens to be.

Victor Huge, Les Misérables

To be ultra is to go beyond. It is to attack the sceptre in the name of the throne, and the mitre in the name of the altar; it is to ill-treat the thing which one is dragging, it is to kick over the traces; it is to cavil at the fagot on the score of the amount of cooking received by heretics; it is to reproach the idol with its small amount of idolatry; it is to insult through excess of respect; it is to discover that the Pope is not sufficiently papish, that the King is not sufficiently royal, and that the night has too much light; it is to be discontented with alabaster, with snow, with the swan and the lily in the name of whiteness; it is to be a partisan of things to the point of becoming their enemy; it is to be so strongly for, as to be against.