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

Tender is the night

Afterward he just sat, happy to live in the past. The drink made past happy things contemporary with the present, as if they were still going on, contemporary even with the future, as if they were about to happen again.


- F Scott Fitzgerald

Help Me

I am falling, I am fading, I am drowning
Help me to breathe
I am hurting, I have lost it all
I am losing
Help me to breathe

- Duvet

Nulla dies sine linea

No day without a blog post.

The meaning of life

The meaning of life is that it stops.

– Kafka

A hell of a good universe

Listen; there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go.

- e. e. cummings

A couple laughing together

I once saw a couple laughing together in the car ahead of me and I sounded my horn in anger.

- J G Ballard, Miracles of Life

The drowned and the saved

I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day. Actually, the experience of the Lager with its frightful iniquity confirmed me in my nonbelief. It has prevented me, and still prevents me, from conceiving of any form of providence or transcendent justice . . . I must nevertheless admit that I experienced (and again only once) the temptation to yield, to seek refuge in prayer. This happened in October 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death . . . I was waiting to file past the ‘commission’ that with one glance would decide whether I should go immediately into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instance I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed: one does not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing. A prayer under these conditions would have been not only absurd (what rights could I claim? and from whom?) but blasphemous, obscene, laden with the greatest impiety of which a nonbeliever is capable. I rejected the temptation: I knew that otherwise were I to survive, I would have to be ashamed of it.

- Primo Levi