How shall a man judge what to do in such times?
One who cannot cast away a treasure at need is in fetters.--Aragorn, Two Towers
John Ruskin:
"Quality. There is hardly anything in the world that some men cannot make a
little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price
only are this man's lawful prey."
I don't really believe, Shadow thought...Everything that's happened so far has been some kind of especially vivid dream. And yet he could not believe that either. All we have to believe with is our senses, the tools we use to perceive the world: our sight, our touch, our memory. If they lie to us, then nothing can be trusted. And even if we do not believe, then still we cannot travel in any other way than the road our senses show us; and we must walk that road to the end. ---American Gods by Gaiman
No, it was you losing the little golden sun killed me, Shadow, killed me dead, as sure as water's wet and days are long and a friend will always disappoint you in the end. ---Mad Sweeney in American Gods by Gaiman
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.---Gandalf the Grey, Fellowship of the Ring
For nothing is evil in the beginning.---Elrond, Felowship of the Ring.
...together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.---Galadriel, Fellowship.
For such is the way of it: to find and lose...But I count you blessed...for your loss you suffer of your own free will, and you might have chosen otherwise.---Legolas, Fellowship.
...the profession of religion and the practice of virtue need not go together.--Hendrik Hertzberg
Freedom is never granted: it is won. Justice is never given: it is exacted.--A. Philip Randolph
QUOTES FROM J. LETHEM
The only people who listen to both sides of a quarrel are the next door neighbors.
Life sucked the marrow right outta his thin bones.--me
Ours is genetic ugliness, not spiritual ugliness.--me
His young buttcheekies set my stirrup pants singing.--me!
Didjaver notice that Profitts' has the most honest & concise name of any retail store in America?--me!
She worked her toes into the sand, feeling the tiny delicious pain of the friction of tiny chips of silicon against the tender flesh between her toes. That's life. It hurts, it's dirty, and it feels very, very good.--Orson Scott Card
Brevity is the soul of lingerie.--Dorothy Parker
Why you dirty bandicoot!--Patricia
Underneath my delicious M&M coat, I'm a bad peanut.--me!
I am a walking adverse reaction.---me!
If you're strong enough, there are no precedents.
Music is the refuge of souls ulcerated by happiness.--Cioran
The French language is nothing more than muttered insults & mumbled prayers that someone suffer terribly before they die.--me
If there's enough blue to make a sailor's breeches, it won't rain.--Patricia L's Uncle
My imagination is a hollow, as painful, as empty, as my sinuses.--me!
A dead man cannot be brave.--Greek Proverb
Prejudice is a lingering malaise, the virus air-borne by gossip...--B. M. Gill (The Fifth Rapunzel)
They change their sky but not their soul who cross the ocean.--Horace
Contraceptives should be used on all conceivable occasions.--Spike Milligan
Time makes more converts than reason.--Thomas Paine
...my iniquities have sold me to the grave...vouchsafe me in a spirit of faith and knowledge.--Psalm Scroll from Dead Sea
The starting point for all achievement is desire. Keep this constantly in mind.--N. Hill
What looks like crazy on an ordinary day looks like love if you catch it in the moonlight.--Oprah book title
"As he ever has judged," said Aragorn. "Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man's part to discern them..."---Two Towers, Tolkien
PAGE FOR ARTURO PEREZ-REVERTE!
The Fencing Master Quotes
QUOTES FROM CANE
See for Yourself
Quotes from J. HELLER
Motherless Brooklyn
I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.--Chesterton
There seemed to be a change in the old man-an added element of furtiveness in the clouded brain which subtly transformed him from an object to a subject of fear-though he was not one to be perturbed by any common family event.--H.P. Lovecraft "The Dunwich Horror" (I added italics)
About quilts:
(p.224) ...when we'd hung a half dozen of them on the line, all in a row, I thought that they looked like flags, hung out by an army as it goes to war.
And since that time I have thought, why is it that women have chosen to sew such flags, and then to lay them on the top of beds? For they make the bed the most noticeable thing in a room. And then I have thought, it's for a warning.
(p. 275) He also said he was sorry for her death, and would say a prayer for her, although what sort of prayer I could not imagine, as he was a heathenish sort of man...But surely the form of a prayer does not matter, and the only distinction God makes is between good will and ill; or so I have come to believe.
(p. 446) I lay there in the darkness with the sound of Nancy's breathing; and in my ears I could hear my own heart, trudging and trudging, as if on a long and weary road that I was doomed to walk along whether I wanted to or not, and who could tell when I would get to the end of it.
(p.591) What is believed in society, is not always the equivalent of what is true; but as regards a woman's reputation, it amounts to the same thing.
...the slow march, the trumpets, the casket through the streets, everyone sombre and celebrating. Or a Protestant burgher's Festmahl (funeral feast) in a Baltic city, with food and drink and flowers, with anecdotes and memories. Or an Irish wake. These are the ultimate recovery groups flamboyantly demonstrating that we do not die alone, that the passed away are passing over and through the communal body...existence is multiple and does not cease with your cessation. The chord, the flow, the herd, the hive dances on.--Hillman & Ventura
First, art forms madness rather than represses it. Second, the arts often act as the sensitive antennae of social justice and moral outrage, keeping the soul awake to hypocrisy, cant, suppression, and jingoism. And third, the fundamental enemy of all art is mediocrity.--Hillman & Ventura
The only way you can understand some marriages, or why certain people stay together, is they've finally found someone they can share their perversion with.--Hillman & Ventura
What does Ortega say? He says: "You love this woman because--because it is this woman." And that makes her the unique woman.--Hillman & Ventura
One realized progress more by omissions than anything else; by pretences dropped.--Fowles (Magus)
'Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationship between objects...War is a psychosis caused by an inabilithy to see relationships...above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.'--Fowles (Magus)
An answer is always a form of death.--Fowles (Magus)
The fear I felt was the same old fear; not of the appearance, but of the reason behind the appearance. It was not the mask I was afraid of, because in our century we are too inured by science fiction and too sure of science reality ever to be terrified of the supernatural again; but of what lay behind the mask. The eternal source of all fear, all horror, all real evil, man himself.--Fowles (Magus)
...he meant something different by 'smile' than I did; that the irony, the humourlessness, the ruthlessness I had always noticed in his smiling was a quality he deliberately inserted; that for him the smile was something essentially cruel, because freedom is cruel, because the freedom that makes us at least partly responsible for what we are is cruel. So that the smile was not so much an attitude to be taken to life as the nature of the cruelty of life...To be is, immutably, to be Iago.--Fowles (Magus)
...it is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government that the crown is not as oppressive in England as in Turkey.--Thomas Paine (Common Sense)
...the nicest construction that words are capable of, when applied to the description of something which either cannot exist, or is too incomprehensible to be within the compass of description, will be words of sound only, and though they may amuse the ear, they cannot inform the mind...--Thomas Paine (Common Sense)
POLITICAL
FINANCIAL
FEAR & TREMBLING----KIERKEGAARD
...if one would truly learn anything from great actions, on emust pay attetnion preceisely to the beginning. In case he who should act were to hudge himself accrding to the result, he would never get to the point of beginning.
If he keeps silent, ethics condemnms him, for it says, "Thou shalt acknowledge the universal, and it is precisely by speaking thou dost acknowledge it, and thou must not have compassion upon the universal.-----REMINDS ME OF GREENE & THE HEART OF THE MATTER
Silence is the snare of the demon, and the more one keeps silent, the more terrifying the demon becomes; but silence is also the mutual understanding between the Diety and the individual.
Abraham cannot speak, for he cannot utter the word which explains all (that is, not so that it is intelligible,) he cannot say that it is a test, and a test of such a sort, be it noted, that the ethical is the temptation [versuchung].----REMINDS ME OF BILLY BUDD'S CAPTAIN
ANFECHTUNG=TEMPTATION
Aesthetics, however, is a courteous and sentimental science which knows of more expedients than a pawnbroker.
In the ethical way of regarding life, it is therefore the task of the individual to divest himself of the inward determinants and express them in an outward way.
The true knight of faith is a witness, never a teacher, and therein lies his deep humanity.
Either the individual becomes the knight of faith by assuming the burden of the paradox, or he never becomes one.
The head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Camdessus did not say that Russia had STIFFED its creditor (the IMF) last month (August 1998.) Instead, he insisted that Russia decided "to unilaterally restructure its domestic debt obligations" in Sept 1998.
The study of economic growth is an important part of economics.--Bharat Trehan (FRBSF Economic Letter)
Wahahahahaha!
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