I believe that a new morning will come,
I do not lie, but ....
- Ishikawa Takuboku
This is how it works
You're young until you're not
You love until you don't
You try until you can't
You laugh until you cry
You cry until you laugh
And everyone must breathe
Until their dying breath
- Regina Spektor, On The Radio
Bandersnatch
Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!
- Lewis Carrol
There are 10 sorts of people
On two occasions I have been asked, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
- Charles Babbage
Cold Water
Love one's daughter
Allow me that
And I can't let go of your hand
- Damien Rice, Cold water
The desert as garden of paradise
Every drought-resistant plant has it's own story
Each has to learn to live with
Less and less water, each would have loved
to laze in long soft rains, in the quiet drip
to laze in long soft rains, in the quiet drip
After the thunderstorm
Each could do without deprivation
But where drought is the epic then there must be some
Who persist, not by species betrayal
But by changing themselves
Minutely, by a constant study
Of the price of continuity
A steady bargain with the way things are.
- Adrienne Rich
Each could do without deprivation
But where drought is the epic then there must be some
Who persist, not by species betrayal
But by changing themselves
Minutely, by a constant study
Of the price of continuity
A steady bargain with the way things are.
- Adrienne Rich
Rooms
Rooms I (I will not say
worked in) once heard in. Words
my mouth heard
then—be
with me. Rooms,
you open onto one
another: still house
this life, be in me
when I leave
- Franz Wright
A Flame is Real
Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning? - even if there's a time it goes out?
- Joyce Carol Oates, Foxfire
We'll dream of a longer summer
But this is the one we have:
I lay my sunburned hand
on your table: this is the time we have
- Adrienne Rich
Lover you should've come over
Looking out the door I see the rain fall upon the funeral mourners
Parading in a wake of sad relations as their shoes fill up with water
- Jeff Buckley
The Mother of Michitsuna
Lying all alone,
Through the hours of the night,
Till the daylight comes:
Can you realize at all
The emptiness of that night?
Burn After Reading
CIA Officer: I don't know, sir.
CIA Superior: I don't fuckin' know either. I guess we learned not to do it again.
CIA Officer: Yes, sir.
CIA Superior: I'm fucked if I know what we did.
CIA Officer: Yes, sir, it's, uh, hard to say
CIA Superior: Jesus Fucking Christ.
Immortality
The purest rarest form of immortality is where you cease to exist and become a cypher for others.
Miracles of Life
"I often think that I have been extremely lucky during my life to have known four beautiful and interesting women: my wife and daughters."
- J G Ballard, Miracles of Life
The Art of Conversation
We had a comrade, a brave comrade
He could talk for days
But then he tried to be a hers
Tried talking about Jean Miro
To commuters wearing earphones
He almost died for conversation.
Hallucinations, Good Vibrations
Van Dyke Parks, steeple chasing,
The reformation, transubstantiation,
Brom Stoker's creation
The land of the Thracians...
- The Divine Comedy
Growing Old
It is -last stage of all -
When we are frozen up within, and quite
The phantom of ourselves,
To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost
Which blamed the living man.
- Matthew Arnold
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain. Time to die.
- Blade Runner
Be Glad
"Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars"
- Henry Van Dyke
- Henry Van Dyke
Rain
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
- Edward Thomas
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
- Edward Thomas
My Death Sentence
Something has happened to my temporal existence. My future has folded in on itself. It has exposed itself to me, contrary to both the laws of nature and of human nature. We are not meant to be able to see into our future. We are propelled into our future, thrown into our projects with no premonition, no peeking. Our life stories are meant to unravel as we go along, at a rate of one second per second. No slower, and certainly no faster. But I was given a crystal ball through which, with painful accuracy and nauseating detail, I can see my future: further decline, hopeless prospects, premature death.
- Havi Carel
Here we lie
Here dead we lie
Because we did not choose
To live and shame the land
From which we sprung.
Life, to be sure,
Is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is,
And we were young.
- Alfred Edward Housman
Because we did not choose
To live and shame the land
From which we sprung.
Life, to be sure,
Is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is,
And we were young.
- Alfred Edward Housman
What is Best
Some celebrate the beauty
of knights, or infantry,
or billowing flotillas
at battle on the sea.
Warfare has its glory,
but I place far above
these military splendors
the one thing that you love.
For proof of this contention
examine history:
we all remember Helen,
who left her family,
her child, and royal husband,
to take a stranger's hand:
her beauty had no equal,
but bowed to love's command.
As love then is the power
that none can disobey,
so too my thoughts must follow
my darling far away:
the sparkle of her laughter
would give me greater joy
than all the bronze-clad heroes
- Sappho
of knights, or infantry,
or billowing flotillas
at battle on the sea.
Warfare has its glory,
but I place far above
these military splendors
the one thing that you love.
For proof of this contention
examine history:
we all remember Helen,
who left her family,
her child, and royal husband,
to take a stranger's hand:
her beauty had no equal,
but bowed to love's command.
As love then is the power
that none can disobey,
so too my thoughts must follow
my darling far away:
the sparkle of her laughter
would give me greater joy
than all the bronze-clad heroes
- Sappho
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