Paul Desmond, Various hilarities

[Paul Desmond played alto with Brubeck and is/was famous for his wit.]

"I was unfashionable before anyone knew who I was."

"I think I had it in the back of my mind that I wanted to sound like a dry martini."

Of Vogue fashion models, he said, "Sometimes they go around with guys who are scuffling -- for a while. But usually they end up marrying some cat with a factory. This is the way the world ends, not with a whim but a banker."

"Sometimes I get the feeling that there are orgies going on all over new
York City, and somebody says, `Let's call Desmond,' and somebody else says,
'Why bother? He's probably home reading the Encyclopedia Britannica.'"

His response to the annoying banality of an interviewer, "You're beginning to sound like a cross between David Frost and David Susskind, and that is a cross I cannot bear."

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

Although men are not normally aware of it, they must believe that they are something more than they are in order to be capable of being what they are; they need to feel this something more above and around them, and there are times when they suddenly miss it.

Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

It was an intelligent country, it housed cultivated people who, like cultivated people all over the globe, ran around in an unsettled state of mind amid a tremendous whirl of noise, speed, innovation, conflict, and whatever goes to make up the optical-acoustical landscape of our lives; like everybody else, they read and heard every day dozens of news items that made their hair stand on end, and were willing to work themselves up over them, even to intervene, but they never got around to it because a few minutes afterward the stimulus had already been displaced in their minds by more recent ones; like everyone else, they felt surrounded by murder, killings, passion, self-sacrifice, and greatness, all somehow going on withint the Gordian knot that was forming around them, but they could never break through to these adventures because they were trapped in an office or somewhere, at work, and by evening when they were free, their unresolved tensions exploded into forms of relaxation that failed to relax them. … They no longer knew what their smiles, their sighs, their ideas, were for. What exactly was the point of their thoughts, their smiles?

Martha Gellhorn

"Our President is a disaster and will get worse; never trust a Texan farther than you can throw a rhino."

Martha Gellhorn on Lyndon Johnson

Chris Hedges, Interview with Bill Moyers 2003

MOYERS: Three times when you were in El Salvador you were threatened with death. You received death threats. The Embassy got you out.

HEDGES: That's right.

MOYERS: You went back.

HEDGES: Yes. Because I believe that it was better to live for one intense and overpowering moment, even if it meant my own death, rather than go back to the routine of life.

Bertolt Brecht

Do not fear death -- fear the inadequate life.

Warren Buffett

I think that a rich person should leave their children enough so that they can do anything. But not enough so that they can do nothing.

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

Incidentally, disturbance from cosmic background radiation is something we have all experienced. Tune your television to any channel it doesn’t receive, and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.

Paul Scott, The Towers of Silence

What was difficult could be done at once, whereas the impossible might take a little longer.

Don DeLillo, Mao II

He looked at the sentence, six disconsolate words, and saw the entire book as it took occasional shape in his mind, a neutered near-human dragging through the house, humpbacked, hydrocephalic, with puckered lips and soft skin, dribbling brain fluid form its mouth. Took him all these years to realize this book was his hated adversary. Locked together in the forbidden room, had him in a chokehold.

Charles Darwin

Blushing is the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions.

Anonymous - 10th Century

The men of my tribe would treat him as game:
if he comes to the camp they will kill him outright.

Our fate is forked.

Wulf is on one island, I on another.
Mine is a fastness: the fens girdle it
and it is defended by the fiercest men.
If he comes to the camp they will kill him for sure.

Our fate is forked.

It was rainy weather, and I wept by the heart,
thinking of my Wulf's far wanderings;
one of the captains caught me in his arms.
It gladdened me then; but it grieved me, too.

Wulf, my Wulf, it was wanting you
that made me sick, your seldom coming,
the hollowness at heart; not the hunger I spoke of.

Do you hear, Eadwacer? Our whelp
Wulf shall take to the wood.
What was never bound is broken easily,
our song together.

Billy Collins, "Forgetfulness"

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel,
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses good-bye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins iwth an L as far you can recall,
well on your way to oblicion, where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the dateo f a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

Itzhak Zuckerman (Holocaust Survivor) in Shoah

If you could lick my heart, it would poison you.

Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

Is this what love is, he wonders, this substance that lies so pressingly between them, so neutral in color yet so palpable it need never be mentioned? Or is love something less, something slippery and odorless, a transparent gas riding through the world on the back of a breeze, or else -- and this is what he more and more believes -- just a word trying to remember another word.

Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries

He felt that he carried in his head some ancient subtle strand of memory, a luminous image of proof and possibility, the coast and continent of achieved happiness.

Eric Hoffer

You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.

Frances Cornford

Magnificently unprepared
For the long littleness of life.

Joan Didion, Where I Was From

There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

Sophocles

Recognize that a single day both lowers and raises again all human things.

Marianne Moore

The cure for loneliness is solitude.

Elia Kazan

Boredom, cruelty, banality are the only sins.

W. H. Auden, A Certain World

Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.

Ingmar Bergman

Imagine I throw a spear into the dark. That is my intuition. Then I have to send an expedition into the jungle to find the spear. That is my intellect.

Seneca

Each day acquire something which will help you to face poverty, or death, and other ills as well.

Miles Davis

When you hit a wrong note it's the next note that makes it good or bad.

Pythagoras

Limit gives form to the limitless.

Eduoard Manet

Conciseness in art is a necessity and a grace.

Igor Stravinsky

The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The fewer limitations the artist imposes on his work, the less chance he has for artistic success.

T. H. Huxley, The Book of Beasts

Ancient traditions, when tested by the severe processes of modern investigation commonly enough fade away into mere dreams; but it is singular how often the dream turns out to have been a half-waking one, presaging reality.

This quotation was copied from the Museum of Jurassic Technology, attributed to T. H. Huxley's The Book of Beasts. There is no such book. T. H. White wrote a book by that name. Aldous Huxley wrote "Brave New World", among others. I have decided to attribute following Mr. Wilson in any case.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.

Harold Pinter, Nobel Prize Lecture 2005

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

Henry David Thoreau

As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.

Mike S. Goldbach

Comedy is tragedy plus time.
Tragedy is comedy minus timing.

Dorothy Parker

I'm never going to be famous. My name will never be writ large on the roster of Those Who Do Things. I don't do any thing. Not one single thing. I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that any more.

Dorothy Parker

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people He gave it to.

Woody Allen

Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?

Anonymous conversation at Sushi Seki

Girl: What is that?
Guy #1: Tuna.
Girl: Tuna with what?
Guy #2: Tuna with delicious.

--Sushi Seki, 1st Avenue

Overheard by: KMR

Woody Allen

I don't want to achieve immortality through my work ... I want to achieve it through not dying.

Lech Walesa

I'm lazy. But it's the lazy people who invented the wheel and the bicycle because they didn't like walking or carrying things.

Walter Cronkite, on television news, 1997

With almost total unanimity, our big, corporate owners, infected with the greed that marks the end of the 20th Century, stretch constantly for ever-increasing profit, condemning quality to take the hindmost. If there is any solution to this problem it might be found in educating the share-holding public to their responsibility in owning this business which is fundamental to the preservation of our democracy.

If they understood the nature of this public service and treated their investment in it accordingly, we would be saved from compromising journalistic integrity in the mad scramble for ratings and circulation. In other words, if they did not expect the constantly increasing, unconscionable profits now expected from most investments but accepted a rational and steady return on their investment in this essential public service of newspapers and broadcast news.

Christiane Amanpour, keynote address, 2000

Yes I have often wondered why I …why we … do it? After a few seconds the answer used to come easily: because it matters, because the world will care once they see our stories … because if we the storytellers don't do this, then the bad guys will win. We do it because we are committed, because we are believers. One thing I knew for certain … I never could have sustained a relationship while I worked that hard, or was that driven by the story …

Indeed in the full flush of journalistic conviction I once told an interviewer that of course I would never get married. And I definitely would never have children. If you have a child, I said, you have a responsibility to at least stay alive.

That was seven years ago. I have been married two years and I have a five-month-old son.

[ellipses in the original]

Edward R. Murrow, keynote address 1958

We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.

Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, Oct. 31, 2005

If only lies left semen stains.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this.

Agatha Christie

Companionship is not a thing one needs every day--it is a thing that grows upon one, and sometimes as destroying as ivy growing round you.

Agatha Christie on writing

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness--to save oneself trouble.

There's no agony like [getting started]. You sit in a room, biting pencils, looking at a typewriter, walking about, or casting yourself down on a sofa, feeling you want to cry your head off.

The best time to plan a book is while you're doing the dishes.

T. E. Lawrence

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Everybody has his own hole to climb out of.