Favorite Quotes

[Mitch]

In the war some of us fought, some of us died and some of us made speaches.

[SteveShaw]

Here's another Thoreau one that I've always liked - in fact I had it up on my classroom wall when I was a teacher:

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

(I think I posted this in another context recently - shows the paucity of my imagination. )

[SteveShaw]

We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.

Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.

[Innocent Bystander]

"Ah, Love, could you and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire
Would we not shatter it to bits and then
Remould it closer to the heart's desire."

Omar Khayyam - Fitzgerald trans.

Suppose he'd listened to the erudite committee
He only would have found where not to look;
Suppose his terrier when he whistled had obeyed
He would not have unearthed the buried city;
Suppose he had dismissed the careless maid
The cryptogram would not have fluttered from the book.

"It was not I", he cried, as, healthily astounded,
He stepped across a predecessor's skull;
"A nonsense jingle simply came into my head
And left the intellectual sphinx dumbfounded;
I won the Queen because my hair was red;
This terrible adventure is a little dull."
Hence failure's torment: "Were we doomed in any case,
Or would we not have failed had we believed in grace?"

W.H. Auden

[CHCBrown]

"Do you ever get the feeling
that the story's too damn real and in the
present tense?

Or that everybody's on the stage
and it seems like you're the only
person sitting in the audience?"

-Ian Anderson, from Skating Away on the Thin Ice of a New Day

[carrie]

.....Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

William Butler Yeats

[Nanohedron]

This one's my own:

"It's not so much the pen as how you sign your name."

[the_kitty]

"It's not the length of life, but the depth of life."
-Emerson (I believe anyway.)

[jim stone]

Death is just nature's way of telling you to slow down. New Age

[Charlene]

But what would you do with a brain if you had one?

I do believe in spooks, I do, I do, I do believe in spooks . . . .

Both the above from the Wizard of Oz movie.

[Jack]

"Everyone who believes in telekinesis, raise my hand."

[peeplj]

"And the tale is told of those who, by the hundreds,
Holding together, sought their death in the sea;
While chanting the praises of the Mother Goddess:
a refusal of betrayal, women were dying to be free."

--Charlie Murphy, from "The Burning Times"


"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."

--Exodus 22:18, the Holy Bible


"If in the midst of the many Dissatisfactions among us, the publication of these Trials may promote such a pious Thankfulness unto God, for Justice being so far executed among us, I shall Re-joyce that God is Glorified..."

--Cotton Mather, referring to the Salem Witch Trials

[Walden]

"And the tale is told of those who, by the hundreds,
Holding together, sought their death in the sea;
While chanting the praises of the Mother Goddess:
a refusal of betrayal, women were dying to be free."

--Charlie Murphy, from "The Burning Times"


"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."

--Exodus 22:18, the Holy Bible


"If in the midst of the many Dissatisfactions among us, the publication of these Trials may promote such a pious Thankfulness unto God, for Justice being so far executed among us, I shall Re-joyce that God is Glorified..."

--Cotton Mather, referring to the Salem Witch Trials

What makes these your favorites?

[Jack]

"And the tale is told of those who, by the hundreds,
Holding together, sought their death in the sea;
While chanting the praises of the Mother Goddess:
a refusal of betrayal, women were dying to be free."

--Charlie Murphy, from "The Burning Times"


"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."

--Exodus 22:18, the Holy Bible


"If in the midst of the many Dissatisfactions among us, the publication of these Trials may promote such a pious Thankfulness unto God, for Justice being so far executed among us, I shall Re-joyce that God is Glorified..."

--Cotton Mather, referring to the Salem Witch Trials

What makes these your favorites?

My thoughts exactly!

[Jim Troy]

though there's dough there , there's love there too though , boy !

(Moya , at the wedding party , Gúgán Barra , 1900 and frozen to death .)

dough = money , wealth .

jimmy ,"i'll go and see if Vincent is awake "
brendan, " how will you tell ? "

Willie Week , '96