Stones taught me to fly
Love taught me to lie
Life taught me to die
So it's not hard to fall
When you float like a cannonball
- Damien Rice
Cannonball
Stones taught me to fly
Love taught me to lie
Life taught me to die
So it's not hard to fall
When you float like a cannonball
- Damien Rice
Big mistakes
They say the dead will rise again. And here they come now.
Strange animals out of the Ice Age. And they stare at you.
Dumbfounded. Like big mistakes. And we say: Keep cool.
Maybe if we pretend this never happened, they'll all just go away.
- Laurie Anderson
The invention of love
But now I really have to go. How lucky to find myself standing on this
empty shore, with the indifferent waters at my feet.
- Tom Stoppard
If we don't, remember me.
- Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Distrust compassion
Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.
- Christopher Hitchens
Traveling Light
I'm only leaving you
for a handful of days,
but it feels as though
I'll be gone forever—
the way the door closes
behind me with such solidity,
the way my suitcase
carries everything
I'd need for an eternity
of traveling light.
- Linda Pastan
Another Year
I have my new Bill Hicks CD
I have my friends and my career
I'm getting smaller by degrees
You said you'd help me disappear
But that could take forever
I think I'll wait another year
- Amanda Palmer
The Old Curiosity Shop
When I die put near me something that has loved the light and has had the sky above it always.
-- Charles Dickens
Letter on the death of her mother
She slipped from our fingers like a flake gathered by the wind, and is now part of the drift called "the infinite."
We don't know where she is, though so many tell us.
-- Emily Dickinson
Gravity
Prof. W. explained to me that there are weightless things. Gravitation for one. It is not material, yet it exists, we feel its pull. So the dead may likewise still exist. Through what they have left behind, through memory, their influence, and so on.
This is no comfort, though, when you howl, yearning for familiar hands, the chest, the one dear body.
— Anna Kamienska, In that Great River: A Notebook
Sleep
Sleep, don't weep, my sweet love
Your face is all wet and your day was rough
So do what you must do to find yourself
- Damien Rice
Radio at Night
When sleep wont stop a dripping tap,
won't warm your feet or keep the burglars at bay,
the radio at night is here.
- Julia Bird
M Theory
There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.
- Steven Hawking
Errata
Remove all periods
They are scars made by words I
couldn't bring myself to say
Put a finger over each sunrise
it will blind you otherwise
- Charles Simic
Alone again or
You know that I could be in love with almost everyone
I think that people are
The greatest fun
- Love
But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them...
- A.A. Milne, The House At Pooh Corner
Damages
that tears apart this neat and tidy day-to-day existence.
There are some sorrows, some calamities—
that can never, from any quarter, be compensated for.
- Ruby Rahman
Trees
- Margaret Atwood, Surfacing
Everything was beautiful
- Kurt Vonnegut
Books
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
- Ray Bradbury
Brian Cox eat your heart out
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.
- Eric Idle
Tornado at Night
Of the overhang of the abandoned gas station,
And resembled the Erecthium's female columns.
The broken power lines flashed white
When they touched the wet ground,
And the girls' legs showed
As round shadows through their nightgowns.
- Stan Rice
Blood
There is something sinister in the sight of blood pouring from one's mouth, like the glow of a distant fire.
- Anton Chekhov
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