A Commonplace Book

One of the few good things

One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.

- Kurt Vonnegut

Common sense and a sense of humor

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.

- William James

Be near me

Be near me when my light is low,
When the blood creeps, and the nerves prick
And tingle; and the heart is sick,

And all the wheels of Being slow.

- Thomas Hardy

Fragile things

There are so many fragile things, after all. People break so easily, and so do dreams and hearts.

- Neil Gaiman

She folds her memories like a parachute

Belfast Tune

Here's a girl from a dangerous town
She crops her dark hair short
So that less of her has to frown
When someone gets hurt.

She folds her memories like a parachute.
Dropped, she collects the peat
And cooks her veggies at home: they shoot
Here where they eat.

Ah, there's more sky in these parts than, say,
Ground. Hence her voice's pitch,
And her stare stains your retina like a gray
Bulb when you switch

Hemispheres, and her knee-length quilt
Skirt's cut to catch the squall,
I dream of her either loved or killed
Because the town's too small.

- Joseph Brodsky

I cry a lot

I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more.

- Maurice Sendak

Any idiot

Any idiot can face a crisis — it's day to day living that wears you out.

- Checkhov

Most of the writers I know

Most of the writers I know are weird hybrids. There's a strong streak of egomania coupled with extreme shyness. Writing's kind of like exhibitionism in private. And there's also a strange loneliness, and a desire to have some kind of conversation with people, but not a real great ability to do it in person.

- David Foster Wallace

Dust of Snow

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

- Robert Frost

Winter is good

Winter is good - his Hoar Delights
Italic flavor yield -
To Intellects inebriate
With Summer, or the World -

Generic as a Quarry
And hearty - as a Rose -
Invited with asperity
But welcome when he goes.

- Emily Dickinson

What a circus

We're all going to die. What a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. we are terrorized and flattened by trvialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

- Charles Bukowski

I Am the People

I am the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world's food and clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons
come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And
then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand
for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.
I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted.
I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and
makes me work and give up what I have. And I forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red
drops for history to remember. Then—I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the
People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer
forget who robbed me last year, who played me for
a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the world
say the name: "The People," with any fleck of a
sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.

- Carl Sandburg

The Universe and Forever

Wendy MacNaughton, The universe and forever

The Pale King

True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.

—David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

The Nac Mac Feegle believe that the world is such a wonderful place that in order to have got into it they must have been very good in another existence and had arrived in, as it were, heaven. Of course, they appeared to die sometimes, even here, but they like to think of it as going off to be born again. Numerous theologians had speculated that this was a stupid idea, but it was certainly more enjoyable than many other beliefs.

- Terry Pratchett, I shall Wear Midnight

Winter Night

All things vanished within
The snowy murk-white,hoary.
A candle burned on the table;
A candle burned.

A corner draft fluttered the flame
And the white fever of temptation
Upswept its angel wings that cast
A cruciform shadow

It snowed hard throughout the month
Of February, and almost constantly
A candle burned on the table;
A candle burned.

- Boris Pasternak

The whole family explodes

My brother's death, when he was eight years old, blew the family apart. He had an accident and it was miserable. It coloured everything. I was 16 and that was the end of family life from that point, as often happens in families where's there's a death of a child. The whole family explodes.

- Paul Bettany

Thought for the Day

I'm [...] interested in having a god who is demonstrably a ventriloquist's dummy. After all, isn't this the way we use most of our deities? We can look through our various sacred books and by choosing one ambiguous passage or one interpretation over another we can pretty much get our gods to justify our own current agendas. We can make them say what we want them to say.

The big advantage of worshipping an actual glove puppet of course is that if things start to get unruly or out of hand you can always put them gak in the gox. And you know, it doesn't matter if they don't want to go gak in the gox, they have to go gak in the gox.

- Alan Moore, Alternative Thought For The day Radio 4

The nurse opened her mouth to speak

The nurse opened her mouth to speak, but Tiffany didn't allow the words any space. 'The cook has told me that you are a very religious woman, always on your knees, and that is fine by me, absolutely fine, but didn't it ever occur to you to take a mop and bucket down there with you? People don't need prayers, Miss Spruce; they need you to do the job in front of you, Miss Spruce. And I have had enough of you, Miss Spruce, and especially of your lovely white coat. I think Roland was very impressed by your wonderful white coat, but I am not, Miss Spruce, because you never do anything that will get it dirty.'

- Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight

Immeasurable emptiness

So that's how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us—that's snatched right out of our hands—even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness.

- Haruki Murakami

The time that is given us

"I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.

"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us."

— J.R.R. Tolkien

First Fig

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light.

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

Afterlife

Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief. Apparently the faith — I thought it faith — which enables me to pray for the other dead has seemed strong only because I have never really cared, not desperately, whether they existed or not.

- CS Lewis

The Fellowship of the Ring

1722

Her face was in a bed of hair,
Like flowers in a plot—
Her hand was whiter than the sperm
That feeds the sacred light.
Her tongue more tender than the tune
That totters in the leaves—
Who hears may be incredulous
Who witnesses, believes.

- Emily Dickinson

Our revels now are ended

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

- William Shakespeare

Atrocities

As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.

- Voltaire

Between Going and Coming

Between going and staying
the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.

All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.

Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.

The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.

I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.

The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.

- Octavio Paz

Remembering

And you wait. You wait for the one thing
that will change your life,
make it more than it is—
something wonderful, exceptional,
stones awakening, depths opening to you.

In the dusky bookstalls
old books glimmer gold and brown.
You think of lands you journeyed through,
of paintings and a dress once worn
by a woman you never found again.

And suddenly you know: that was enough.
You rise and there appears before you
in all its longings and hesitations
the shape of what you lived.

- Rilke

"Life, and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing. The..."

Life, and the world, or whatever we call that which we are and feel, is an astonishing thing. The mist of familiarity obscures from us the wonder of our being. We are stuck with admiration at some of its transient modifications; but it is itself the great miracle.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley