Everyone must leave something behind

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away.

- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Insomnia

Thin are the night-skirts left behind
By daybreak hours that onward creep,
And thin, alas! the shred of sleep
That wavers with the spirit's wind:
But in half-dreams that shift and roll
And still remember and forget,
My soul this hour has drawn your soul
A little nearer yet.

- Dante Gabriel Rossetti

When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease

When an old cricketer leaves the crease, well you never know whether he's gone
If sometimes you're catching a fleeting glimpse of a twelfth man at silly mid-on
And it could be me and it could be thee.

- Roy Harper

Ridiculous

It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.

- Agatha Christie

Song of Myself

I bequeathe myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love;
If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere, waiting for you.

- Walt Whitman

Braver Thank You Think

If ever there is tomorrow when we're not together.. there is something you must always remember. you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. but the most important thing is, even if we're apart.. i'll always be with you."

- A. A. Milne

I have been one acquainted with the night

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right
I have been one acquainted with the night.

- Robert Frost

Safe

Do not feel safe. The poet remembers.
You may kill him — another will be born.
Deeds and words shall be recorded.

- Czeslaw Milosz

Fall

You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.

- Hemingway

Progress

Another instance of a realization that the superstitious belief in progress is insufficient as a guide to life, was my brother's death. Wise, good, serious, he fell ill while still a young man, suffered for more than a year, and died painfully, not understanding why he had lived and still less why he had to die. No theories could give me, or him, any reply to these questions during his slow and painful dying.

- Tolstoy

The Name of the Rose

Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realised that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors."

- Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

Small Creatures

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

- Carl Sagan

You will find out everything

You will die and find out everything — or cease asking.

- Tolstoy

Why

Why all the embarrassment
about being happy?
Sometimes I'm as happy
as a sleeping dog,
and for the same reasons,
and for others.

- Wendell Berry

The Patient

But the patient's concentration is distilled, moment by moment: breathing, not being sick, not coughing, coughing in the right way.

Death stays when the visitors have gone, and the nurses turn a blind eye; he leans back on his throne, crosses his legs, and says: "Entertain me."

- Hilary Mantel

Tintern Abbey

...As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,

His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love.

- W. Wordsworth

I am a humanist

I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead.

- Kurt Vonnegut

Smart or Stupid?

And yet, other things being equal, it is better to be smart than to be stupid …

– Carl Sagan

Mother Night

There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too.

- Kurt Vonnegut

Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Time

Millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon. 

- Susan Ertz

It is time

Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
and on the meadows let the wind go free.
Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.
Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander along the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Autumn Day (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

The trouble with being a critical thinker

I think the trouble with being a critical thinker, or an atheist, or a humanist is that you're right. And it's quite hard being right in the face of people who are wrong without sounding like a fuckwit. People go "Do you think the vast majority of the world is wrong?", well yes, I don't know how to say that nicely, but yes.

- Ellen DeGeneres

A little

If a little is not enough for you, nothing is.

- Epicurus

The future

Stephen Hawking found it tantalising that we cannot remember the future. To him and all others younger than myself I say "be patient". Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog that knows you and loves you no matter who you are.

- Kurt Vonnegut, Introduction to Slaughterhouse 5

People do not grow up…

I am convinced that most people do not grow up… We marry and dare to have children and call that growing up. I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies, and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are innocent and shy as Magnolias.

- Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter

Should lanterns shine

The ball I threw while playing in the park

Has not yet reached the ground.

- Dylan Thomas

Stories

We who make stories know that we tell lies for a living. But they are good lies that say true things, and we owe it to our readers to build them as best we can. Because somewhere out there is someone who needs that story. Someone who will grow up with a different landscape, who without that story will be a different person. And who with that story may have hope, or wisdom, or kindness, or comfort.

And that is why we write.

- Neil Gaiman (Newbery Award Acceptance Speech)

Last words

I must go in. The fog is rising.

- Emily Dickinson

Platitude for the Day

Young people in China see Christianity as the modern way of thinking, the way of the future, the bright shining way forward, the religion of bold new ideas, the religion that dares to say: a guy died on a stick to save you from a talking snake.

The truth

When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth.

— Steve Jobs