Going To Maine's profile (website)
Info
Name: Going To Maine, of course
Joined: January 8, 2013
About
What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.
If you’re suffering from severe depression or black thoughts, there is help on the MeFi Wiki. It’s not a silver bullet, but nothing is. Good luck!
—————
Long time lurker, first time username holder! I chose this username because I very much like The Mountain Goats’ song of the same title. If you’re curious about the band, I heartily endorse this free recording of the 2007 ZOOP concert. ZOOP was a fundraiser for Farm Sanctuary’s shelter in Watkins Glen, NY. It’s dear to the heart of lead singer / often-sole-member John Darnielle, and the two nights of shows have a joyous, campfire sing-along vibe to them.
—————
I’ve made several posts to the blue but my first is my favorite. My twenty-seventh is my most embarrassing; avoid using spicy pull quotes when making an FPP about something you care about. Instead of sparking an interesting discussion about a controversial figure, you’ll just sow a bunch of discord.
—————
If you’re wondering if you should nope out of a thread because you might say something nasty, the answer is probably “yes”. (A note for my own benefit. Other site members clearly disagree.)
—————
My first AskMe question was about finding a copy of the old Sleater-Kinney “live vault” fan recordings of shows . If you’re curious about the live vault, shoot me a MeMail.
—————
I love a good quote. These used to live on a different site, but many perished during a redesign. The remainder now live here, along with some new friends. While once ordered chronologically according to my discovering them, they’ve since been sort of arranged by them and type. Sort of. (And yes, I’m counting poems as quotes. If you don’t want to count poems as quotes, you’re free to make your own list.)
——
“The taste
of rain
—Why kneel?”
– Jack Kerouac
——
“I read a quote from an elderly priest some years ago, who was asked what he had learned about human nature from 40 years of listening to confessions. He said, ‘First, the world is full of unhappy people. And second, there are no grown-ups.’”
– Eyebrows McGee, Comment #2179810
——
“The purpose of a system is what it does.”
– (Anthony) Stafford Beer
——
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
– Kurt Vonnegut, introduction to Mother Night
——
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”
– Philip K. Dick, “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later”
——
“‘Your father,’ said Saunders, ‘is a lost cause. He thinks boys are great, and he’s never going to think you’re anything because you’re a girl.’
‘Well,’ says Golden, ‘I can’t change that.’
‘No, but you could stop wanting him to change,’ said Saunders.
Emma felt like the top of her head would fly off. Saunders got it, the whole thing. ‘That’s what I mean,’ said Emma loudly. ‘That’s just what I’m talking about. We have to stop waiting around for them to love us.’”
– Louise Fitzhugh, Nobody’s Family is Going to Change (as quoted by Ira Glass on This American Life)
——
“Welcome everything; push away nothing.
Find a place of stillness in the middle of things.
Don’t wait.
Cultivate ‘Don’t know’ mind.
Bring your whole self into the room.”
– janey47’s description of the five precepts of care-giving practiced at the Zen Hospice Project; they were developed by Frank Ostaseski.
——
“Well, maybe for certain people—maybe for certain people who lived at the beginning of the twentieth century—what was hidden and unconscious was the inner life. Maybe the only thing those people could see was the outward circumstance, where they were, what they did, and they had no idea at all of what was inside them. But something's been hidden from me, too. Something—a part of myself—has been hidden from me, and I think it's the part that's there on the surface, what anyone in the world could see about me if they saw me out the window of a passing train.”
– Wallace Shawn, The Fever
——
“The captain had an answer for everything tonight. He hadn’t been listening to their lies for twenty-odd years for nothing.
‘I cook on the Santa Fe.’
‘Glad to know it. After this I’ll ride the Southern Pacific.’ He dismissed the cook for some gaunt wreck in a smudged clerical collar. ‘Are you a preacher?’ The captain sounded puzzled.
‘I’ve been defrocked.’
‘You still preach pretty good when it comes to cashing phony checks. What were you defrocked for?’
‘Because I believe we are all members of one another.’
That one stopped the captain cold. He studied the wreck as if suddenly so uncertain of himself that he was afraid to ask him what he had meant by that. ‘I dont’t get it,’ he acknowledged at last, and passed on, with greater confidence, to a little heroin-head batting his eyes and coughing the little dry addict’s cough politely into his palm.”
– Nelson Algren, The Man With The Golden Arm
——
“My friends do not know
about the soft black thing inside me
when I am talking to them, while I am sleeping
It floats next to my bed
it is not for any of them
soon they will start to see it
when I kiss them they will feel it
protrude into them
and when they are laying next to me
they will feel the warmth of it
nothing is keeping me from it
and I know one day there will be nothing left that anyone can do for me
it will become me
it will envelope me completely”
– R.L. Kelly, “Fake Out” (lyrics by Eric Livingston)
——
“Sous les pavés, la plage!” (“Under the paving-stones, the beach!”)
– Slogan dating from the 1968 Paris student riots, used by Thomas Pynchon as an opening epigraph to Inherent Vice
——
“It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.
But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records.....
Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.”
– Naomi Shihab Nye, “So Much Happiness”
——
“The supreme good is like water,
which nourishes all things without trying to.
It is content with the low places that people disdain
Thus it is like the Tao.
In dwelling, live close to the ground.
In thinking, keep to the simple.
In conflict, be fair and generous.
In governing, don’t try to control.
In work, do what you enjoy.
In family life, be completely present.
When you are content to be simply yourself
and don’t compare or compete,
everybody will respect you.”
– Laozi, Chapter 8 of the Tao Te Ching, translated by Stephen Mitchell
“Water is the source of all life, life’s matrix and fecundity; it overflows into everything, it moves everywhere. We are fundamentally water: muscled water. And the idea that we ever leave the amniotic fluid is a misconception. The amniotic fluid is the state of total nourishment and unconditional love. It is always present for us and contains everything we could possibly want. In fact, we are that fluid of love.”
– Emilie Conrad, commenting on the first line of Chapter 8 of the Tao Te Ching
——
“Having a Coke with You
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it”
– Frank O’Hara, Having a Coke with You
——
“‘If men would behave decently the world would be decent’ is not such a platitude as it sounds.”
– George Orwell, “Charles Dickens”
——
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
– Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16,1953. (This speech is colloquially known as “The Cross of Iron” speech.)
——
“Work, Not Wages”
– Depression-era union/socialist slogan
——
“‘Okay world,’ I said, ‘I’ll love ya.’”
– Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
——
“you fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye”
– Margaret Atwood, You fit into me
——
“Don’t take life so serious, son, it ain’t nohow permanent.”
– Porky Pine, in Walt Kelly’s Pogo
“Traces of nobility, gentleness and courage persist in all people, do what we will to stamp out the trend. So, too, do those characteristics which are ugly. It is just unfortunate that in the clumsy hands of a cartoonist all traits become ridiculous, leading to a certain amount of self-conscious expostulation and the desire to join battle.
“There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tinny blast on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.
“Forward!”
– Walt Kelly, forward to The Pogo Papers
——
“[Nadia Boulanger] made me understand that I wasn’t, for every little piece I wrote, in competition with the ghost of Beethoven or Brahms, that it was more like writing a letter; I had something on my mind and could perhaps say it clearly, and that was quite sufficient.”
– Virgil Thomson, in an interview with Studs Terkel; collected in And They All Sang
——
“…and how he kissed me
under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then
I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I
yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes
and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and
his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
– James Joyce, Ulysses
——
“Jesus said: When you give rise to that which is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not give rise to it, what you do not have will destroy you.”
– The Gospel of Thomas, translated by Stephen Davies
——
“And the love we hold,
and the love we spurn,
will never
grow cold
only taciturn.”
– Joanna Newsom, “Sadie”
——
“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
– Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince
——
“HARPER: But I saw something only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such things.”
– Tony Kushner, Angels In America
——
“Happiness is such hard work, and it gets harder every day
And it can kill you, but no one wants to be that tacky about it”
– The Dismemberment Plan, “Gyroscope”
“And sometimes that music drifts through my car
On a spring night when anything is possible
And I close my eyes and I nod my head
And I wonder how you been
And I count to a hundred and ten
Because you’ll always be my hero
Even if I never see you again”
– The Dismemberment Plan, “Back and Forth”
——
“DYSART: Look! Life is only comprehensible through a thousand local gods.”
– Peter Shaffer, Equus
——
“Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night,
The swaying in darkness, the lovers like spoons?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes?
Does he hum them to while away sad afternoons
And the long, lonesome Sundays? Or sing them for spite?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night?”
– A.E. Stallings, Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther
——
“GREG: I am approaching you and giving you a positive greeting which I am counting on you to return in such a way that I will feel completely vindicated in my hope and desire that I am a good person, who deserves the love of others, and the love of myself, every single second of every single day!”
– Greg Allen, The Lower Depths
——
“LITTLE SALLY: I don’t think too many people are going to come see this play, Officer Lockstock.
LOCKSTOCK: Why do you say that, Little Sally? Don’t you think people want to be told that their way of life is unsustainable?”
– Greg Kotis, Urinetown
——
“The reader of these pages should not look for detailed documentation of every word. In treating of the general problems of culture one is constantly obliged to undertake predatory incursions into provinces not sufficiently explored by the raider himself. To fill in all the gaps in my knowledge beforehand was out of the question for me. I had to write now, or not at all. And I wanted to write.”
– Johan Huizinga, forward to Homo Ludens
——
“In the Kamigata area they have a sort of tiered lunchbox they use for a single day when flower viewing. Upon returning, they throw them away, trampling them underfoot. As might be expected, this is one of my recollections of the capital. The end is important in all things.”
– Tsunetomo Yamamoto, The Hagakure, as quoted in Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog
——
“OBI-WAN: You’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.”
– Lawrence Kasdan and George Lucas, Return of the Jedi
——
“In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable – which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, intraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.”
– Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
“Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.”
– Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
(One can take almost every sentence Marilynne Robinson has set down as a beautiful and intelligent quote. She is a wonder.)
“It seems to me people tend to forget that we are to love our enemies, not to satisfy some standard of righteousness but because God their Father loves them.”
– Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
(Oh, bother. This is a Goodreads page full of quotes from Robinson. Go knock yourself out; I’m moving on.)
——
“A prime part of the history of our Constitution is the story of the extension of constitutional rights to people once ignored or excluded.”
– Ruth Bader Ginsburg, United States v. Virginia
——
“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”
– Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness
——
“The child comes home and the parent puts the hooks in him. The old man, or the woman, as the case may be, hasn’t got anything to say to the child. All he wants is to have that child sit in a chair for a couple of hours and then go off to bed under the same roof. It’s not love. I am not saying that there is not such a thing as love. I am merely pointing to something which is different from love but which sometimes goes by the name of love. It may well be that without this thing which I am talking about there would not be any love. But this thing in itself is not love. It is just something in the blood. It is a kind of blood greed, and it is the fate of a man. It is the thing which man has which distinguishes him from the happy brute creation. When you got born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a hame trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can’t get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.”
– Robert Penn Warren, All The King’s Men
——
“Have compassion for everyone you meet,
even if they don’t want it.
What appears bad manners, an ill temper or cynicism
is always a sign of things no ears have heard,
no eyes have seen.
You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.”
– Miller Williams, “The Ways We Touch”
——
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
– Carl Sagan, Cosmos
——
“All models are wrong but some are useful”
– George Box
——
“There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up so that other people can send further thousands of words down to the dust and the dark. Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign them to the dust and the dark.
“There are people who think death a fate worse than boredom.”
– Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai
——
“The man you see before you is here by the grace of God. The fact that it took 12 and a half years and a movie to prove my innocence should scare the hell out of everyone in this room and, if it doesn’t, then that scares the hell out of me.”
– Randall Dale Adams, quoted in “Adams v. The Death Penalty”
——
“It is certain, I think, that the best government is the one that governs least. But there is a much-neglected corollary: the best citizen is the one who least needs governing.”
– Wendell Berry, “The Loss of the Future”
——
“We see the world not as it is, but as we are.”
– Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur (disputed)
——
“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”
– Anaïs Nin, D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study
——
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
– Anatole France, The Red Lily
——
“Reality is Reality. It transcends every concept”
– Thích Nhất Hạnh
“In true dialogue, both sides are willing to change.”
– Thích Nhất Hạnh
——
“Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
– Gustav Flaubert, Letter to Gertrude Tenant
“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
– Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
——
“This is It
and I am It
and You are It
and so is That
and He is It
and She is It
and It is It
and That is That
O it is This
and it is Thus
and it is Them
and it is Us
and it is Now
and Here It is
and Here We are
so This is It”
– James Broughton, This is It
——
“Ye knowe eek, that in forme of speche is chaunge (You know that the form of speech will change)
Withinne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho (within a thousand years, and words that)
That hadden prys, now wonder nyce and straunge (were once apt, we now regard as quaint and strange;)
Us thinketh hem; and yet they spake hem so, (and yet they spoke them thus,)
And spedde as wel in love as men now do” (and succeeded as well in love as men do now.)
– Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde
——
“If you’re honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you’re forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws.”
– Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker
——
“Joy is the yeast that makes [the soul] rise.”
– Tom Robbins, Villa Incognito
——
“You know… for kids.”
—————
My current profile picture is Jay Ryan’s “Nine Black Puppies”
—————
MetaFilter: ebb & flow
If you’re suffering from severe depression or black thoughts, there is help on the MeFi Wiki. It’s not a silver bullet, but nothing is. Good luck!
—————
Long time lurker, first time username holder! I chose this username because I very much like The Mountain Goats’ song of the same title. If you’re curious about the band, I heartily endorse this free recording of the 2007 ZOOP concert. ZOOP was a fundraiser for Farm Sanctuary’s shelter in Watkins Glen, NY. It’s dear to the heart of lead singer / often-sole-member John Darnielle, and the two nights of shows have a joyous, campfire sing-along vibe to them.
—————
I’ve made several posts to the blue but my first is my favorite. My twenty-seventh is my most embarrassing; avoid using spicy pull quotes when making an FPP about something you care about. Instead of sparking an interesting discussion about a controversial figure, you’ll just sow a bunch of discord.
—————
If you’re wondering if you should nope out of a thread because you might say something nasty, the answer is probably “yes”. (A note for my own benefit. Other site members clearly disagree.)
—————
My first AskMe question was about finding a copy of the old Sleater-Kinney “live vault” fan recordings of shows . If you’re curious about the live vault, shoot me a MeMail.
—————
I love a good quote. These used to live on a different site, but many perished during a redesign. The remainder now live here, along with some new friends. While once ordered chronologically according to my discovering them, they’ve since been sort of arranged by them and type. Sort of. (And yes, I’m counting poems as quotes. If you don’t want to count poems as quotes, you’re free to make your own list.)
——
“The taste
of rain
—Why kneel?”
– Jack Kerouac
——
“I read a quote from an elderly priest some years ago, who was asked what he had learned about human nature from 40 years of listening to confessions. He said, ‘First, the world is full of unhappy people. And second, there are no grown-ups.’”
– Eyebrows McGee, Comment #2179810
——
“The purpose of a system is what it does.”
– (Anthony) Stafford Beer
——
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
– Kurt Vonnegut, introduction to Mother Night
——
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”
– Philip K. Dick, “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later”
——
“‘Your father,’ said Saunders, ‘is a lost cause. He thinks boys are great, and he’s never going to think you’re anything because you’re a girl.’
‘Well,’ says Golden, ‘I can’t change that.’
‘No, but you could stop wanting him to change,’ said Saunders.
Emma felt like the top of her head would fly off. Saunders got it, the whole thing. ‘That’s what I mean,’ said Emma loudly. ‘That’s just what I’m talking about. We have to stop waiting around for them to love us.’”
– Louise Fitzhugh, Nobody’s Family is Going to Change (as quoted by Ira Glass on This American Life)
——
“Welcome everything; push away nothing.
Find a place of stillness in the middle of things.
Don’t wait.
Cultivate ‘Don’t know’ mind.
Bring your whole self into the room.”
– janey47’s description of the five precepts of care-giving practiced at the Zen Hospice Project; they were developed by Frank Ostaseski.
——
“Well, maybe for certain people—maybe for certain people who lived at the beginning of the twentieth century—what was hidden and unconscious was the inner life. Maybe the only thing those people could see was the outward circumstance, where they were, what they did, and they had no idea at all of what was inside them. But something's been hidden from me, too. Something—a part of myself—has been hidden from me, and I think it's the part that's there on the surface, what anyone in the world could see about me if they saw me out the window of a passing train.”
– Wallace Shawn, The Fever
——
“The captain had an answer for everything tonight. He hadn’t been listening to their lies for twenty-odd years for nothing.
‘I cook on the Santa Fe.’
‘Glad to know it. After this I’ll ride the Southern Pacific.’ He dismissed the cook for some gaunt wreck in a smudged clerical collar. ‘Are you a preacher?’ The captain sounded puzzled.
‘I’ve been defrocked.’
‘You still preach pretty good when it comes to cashing phony checks. What were you defrocked for?’
‘Because I believe we are all members of one another.’
That one stopped the captain cold. He studied the wreck as if suddenly so uncertain of himself that he was afraid to ask him what he had meant by that. ‘I dont’t get it,’ he acknowledged at last, and passed on, with greater confidence, to a little heroin-head batting his eyes and coughing the little dry addict’s cough politely into his palm.”
– Nelson Algren, The Man With The Golden Arm
——
“My friends do not know
about the soft black thing inside me
when I am talking to them, while I am sleeping
It floats next to my bed
it is not for any of them
soon they will start to see it
when I kiss them they will feel it
protrude into them
and when they are laying next to me
they will feel the warmth of it
nothing is keeping me from it
and I know one day there will be nothing left that anyone can do for me
it will become me
it will envelope me completely”
– R.L. Kelly, “Fake Out” (lyrics by Eric Livingston)
——
“Sous les pavés, la plage!” (“Under the paving-stones, the beach!”)
– Slogan dating from the 1968 Paris student riots, used by Thomas Pynchon as an opening epigraph to Inherent Vice
——
“It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.
But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records.....
Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.”
– Naomi Shihab Nye, “So Much Happiness”
——
“The supreme good is like water,
which nourishes all things without trying to.
It is content with the low places that people disdain
Thus it is like the Tao.
In dwelling, live close to the ground.
In thinking, keep to the simple.
In conflict, be fair and generous.
In governing, don’t try to control.
In work, do what you enjoy.
In family life, be completely present.
When you are content to be simply yourself
and don’t compare or compete,
everybody will respect you.”
– Laozi, Chapter 8 of the Tao Te Ching, translated by Stephen Mitchell
“Water is the source of all life, life’s matrix and fecundity; it overflows into everything, it moves everywhere. We are fundamentally water: muscled water. And the idea that we ever leave the amniotic fluid is a misconception. The amniotic fluid is the state of total nourishment and unconditional love. It is always present for us and contains everything we could possibly want. In fact, we are that fluid of love.”
– Emilie Conrad, commenting on the first line of Chapter 8 of the Tao Te Ching
——
“Having a Coke with You
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it”
– Frank O’Hara, Having a Coke with You
——
“‘If men would behave decently the world would be decent’ is not such a platitude as it sounds.”
– George Orwell, “Charles Dickens”
——
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
– Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 16,1953. (This speech is colloquially known as “The Cross of Iron” speech.)
——
“Work, Not Wages”
– Depression-era union/socialist slogan
——
“‘Okay world,’ I said, ‘I’ll love ya.’”
– Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
——
“you fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye”
– Margaret Atwood, You fit into me
——
“Don’t take life so serious, son, it ain’t nohow permanent.”
– Porky Pine, in Walt Kelly’s Pogo
“Traces of nobility, gentleness and courage persist in all people, do what we will to stamp out the trend. So, too, do those characteristics which are ugly. It is just unfortunate that in the clumsy hands of a cartoonist all traits become ridiculous, leading to a certain amount of self-conscious expostulation and the desire to join battle.
“There is no need to sally forth, for it remains true that those things which make us human are, curiously enough, always close at hand. Resolve then, that on this very ground, with small flags waving and tinny blast on tiny trumpets, we shall meet the enemy, and not only may he be ours, he may be us.
“Forward!”
– Walt Kelly, forward to The Pogo Papers
——
“[Nadia Boulanger] made me understand that I wasn’t, for every little piece I wrote, in competition with the ghost of Beethoven or Brahms, that it was more like writing a letter; I had something on my mind and could perhaps say it clearly, and that was quite sufficient.”
– Virgil Thomson, in an interview with Studs Terkel; collected in And They All Sang
——
“…and how he kissed me
under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then
I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I
yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes
and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and
his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
– James Joyce, Ulysses
——
“Jesus said: When you give rise to that which is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not give rise to it, what you do not have will destroy you.”
– The Gospel of Thomas, translated by Stephen Davies
——
“And the love we hold,
and the love we spurn,
will never
grow cold
only taciturn.”
– Joanna Newsom, “Sadie”
——
“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
– Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince
——
“HARPER: But I saw something only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such things.”
– Tony Kushner, Angels In America
——
“Happiness is such hard work, and it gets harder every day
And it can kill you, but no one wants to be that tacky about it”
– The Dismemberment Plan, “Gyroscope”
“And sometimes that music drifts through my car
On a spring night when anything is possible
And I close my eyes and I nod my head
And I wonder how you been
And I count to a hundred and ten
Because you’ll always be my hero
Even if I never see you again”
– The Dismemberment Plan, “Back and Forth”
——
“DYSART: Look! Life is only comprehensible through a thousand local gods.”
– Peter Shaffer, Equus
——
“Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night,
The swaying in darkness, the lovers like spoons?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes?
Does he hum them to while away sad afternoons
And the long, lonesome Sundays? Or sing them for spite?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night?”
– A.E. Stallings, Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther
——
“GREG: I am approaching you and giving you a positive greeting which I am counting on you to return in such a way that I will feel completely vindicated in my hope and desire that I am a good person, who deserves the love of others, and the love of myself, every single second of every single day!”
– Greg Allen, The Lower Depths
——
“LITTLE SALLY: I don’t think too many people are going to come see this play, Officer Lockstock.
LOCKSTOCK: Why do you say that, Little Sally? Don’t you think people want to be told that their way of life is unsustainable?”
– Greg Kotis, Urinetown
——
“The reader of these pages should not look for detailed documentation of every word. In treating of the general problems of culture one is constantly obliged to undertake predatory incursions into provinces not sufficiently explored by the raider himself. To fill in all the gaps in my knowledge beforehand was out of the question for me. I had to write now, or not at all. And I wanted to write.”
– Johan Huizinga, forward to Homo Ludens
——
“In the Kamigata area they have a sort of tiered lunchbox they use for a single day when flower viewing. Upon returning, they throw them away, trampling them underfoot. As might be expected, this is one of my recollections of the capital. The end is important in all things.”
– Tsunetomo Yamamoto, The Hagakure, as quoted in Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog
——
“OBI-WAN: You’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.”
– Lawrence Kasdan and George Lucas, Return of the Jedi
——
“In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable – which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, intraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.”
– Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
“Nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.”
– Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
(One can take almost every sentence Marilynne Robinson has set down as a beautiful and intelligent quote. She is a wonder.)
“It seems to me people tend to forget that we are to love our enemies, not to satisfy some standard of righteousness but because God their Father loves them.”
– Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
(Oh, bother. This is a Goodreads page full of quotes from Robinson. Go knock yourself out; I’m moving on.)
——
“A prime part of the history of our Constitution is the story of the extension of constitutional rights to people once ignored or excluded.”
– Ruth Bader Ginsburg, United States v. Virginia
——
“We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”
– Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness
——
“The child comes home and the parent puts the hooks in him. The old man, or the woman, as the case may be, hasn’t got anything to say to the child. All he wants is to have that child sit in a chair for a couple of hours and then go off to bed under the same roof. It’s not love. I am not saying that there is not such a thing as love. I am merely pointing to something which is different from love but which sometimes goes by the name of love. It may well be that without this thing which I am talking about there would not be any love. But this thing in itself is not love. It is just something in the blood. It is a kind of blood greed, and it is the fate of a man. It is the thing which man has which distinguishes him from the happy brute creation. When you got born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a hame trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can’t get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.”
– Robert Penn Warren, All The King’s Men
——
“Have compassion for everyone you meet,
even if they don’t want it.
What appears bad manners, an ill temper or cynicism
is always a sign of things no ears have heard,
no eyes have seen.
You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.”
– Miller Williams, “The Ways We Touch”
——
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
– Carl Sagan, Cosmos
——
“All models are wrong but some are useful”
– George Box
——
“There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up so that other people can send further thousands of words down to the dust and the dark. Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign them to the dust and the dark.
“There are people who think death a fate worse than boredom.”
– Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai
——
“The man you see before you is here by the grace of God. The fact that it took 12 and a half years and a movie to prove my innocence should scare the hell out of everyone in this room and, if it doesn’t, then that scares the hell out of me.”
– Randall Dale Adams, quoted in “Adams v. The Death Penalty”
——
“It is certain, I think, that the best government is the one that governs least. But there is a much-neglected corollary: the best citizen is the one who least needs governing.”
– Wendell Berry, “The Loss of the Future”
——
“We see the world not as it is, but as we are.”
– Anaïs Nin, Seduction of the Minotaur (disputed)
——
“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”
– Anaïs Nin, D.H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study
——
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
– Anatole France, The Red Lily
——
“Reality is Reality. It transcends every concept”
– Thích Nhất Hạnh
“In true dialogue, both sides are willing to change.”
– Thích Nhất Hạnh
——
“Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
– Gustav Flaubert, Letter to Gertrude Tenant
“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.”
– Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
——
“This is It
and I am It
and You are It
and so is That
and He is It
and She is It
and It is It
and That is That
O it is This
and it is Thus
and it is Them
and it is Us
and it is Now
and Here It is
and Here We are
so This is It”
– James Broughton, This is It
——
“Ye knowe eek, that in forme of speche is chaunge (You know that the form of speech will change)
Withinne a thousand yeer, and wordes tho (within a thousand years, and words that)
That hadden prys, now wonder nyce and straunge (were once apt, we now regard as quaint and strange;)
Us thinketh hem; and yet they spake hem so, (and yet they spoke them thus,)
And spedde as wel in love as men now do” (and succeeded as well in love as men do now.)
– Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde
——
“If you’re honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you’re forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws.”
– Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker
——
“Joy is the yeast that makes [the soul] rise.”
– Tom Robbins, Villa Incognito
——
“You know… for kids.”
—————
My current profile picture is Jay Ryan’s “Nine Black Puppies”
—————
MetaFilter: ebb & flow