[ All credit to jhartho, whose lovely picture may be found here. ]
“Do not let yourself be bothered by the inconsequential.
One has only so much time in this world,
so devote it to the work and the people most important to you,
to those you love and things that matter.
One can waste half a lifetime with people one doesn’t really like,
or doing things when one would be better off somewhere else.”
[ Louis L’Amour – Ride the River ]
[ All credit to rodneyharrison1966, whose lovely picture may be found here. ]
“Mr. Constant,”
he said,
“right now you’re as easy for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to watch as a man on a street corner selling apples and pears.
But just imagine how hard you would be to watch if you had a whole office building jammed to the rafters with industrial bureaucrats
—men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and demand everything in quintuplicate,
and who understand perhaps a third of what is said to them;
who habitually give misleading answers in order to gain time in which to think,
who make decisions only when forced to, and who then cover their tracks;
who make perfectly honest mistakes in addition and subtraction,
who call meetings whenever they feel lonely,
who write memos whenever they feel unloved;
men who never throw anything away unless they think it could get them fired.
A single industrial bureaucrat,
if he is sufficiently vital and nervous,
should be able to create a ton of meaningless papers a year for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to examine.”
[ All credit to bostankorkulugu, whose lovely picture may be found here. ]
“…time was not passing…it was turning in a circle…”
[ All credit to andrew and hobbes, whose lovely picture may be found here. ]
“When we have done our best, we should wait the result in peace.”
[ John Lubbock ]
[ All credit to eleth@n in China!, whose lovely picture may be found here. ]
” Live, then, and be happy, beloved children of my heart,
and never forget,
that until the day God will deign to reveal the future to man,
all human wisdom is contained in these two words,
‘Wait and Hope.”
[ Alexandre Dumas ]
[ All credit to InCaudaVenenum, whose lovely picture may be found here. ]
“I thought about how there are two types of secrets:
the kind you want to keep in,
and the kind you don’t dare to let out.”
[ All credit to Timoleon Vieta II, whose lovely picture may be found here. ]
“I wanted a perfect ending.
Now I’ve learned,
the hard way,
that some poems don’t rhyme,
and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end.
Life is about not knowing,
having to change,
taking the moment and making the best of it,
without knowing what’s going to happen next.
Delicious Ambiguity.”
[ Gilda Radner ]
[ All credit to alan shapiro photography, whose lovely picture may be found here.]
“I can believe things that are true
and things that aren’t true
and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not.
I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny
and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed.
Listen – I believe that people are perfectable, that knowledge is infinite,
that the world is run by secret banking cartels
and is visited by aliens on a regular basis,
nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs
and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.
I believe that the future sucks
and I believe that the future rocks
and I believe that one day
White Buffalo Woman is going to come back
and kick everyone’s ass.
I believe that all men are just overgrown boys
with deep problems communicating
and that the decline in good sex in America
is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state.
I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks
and I still believe that they are better than the alternative.
I believe that California is going to sink into the sea
when the big one comes,
while Florida is going to dissolve into madness
and alligators
and toxic waste.
I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance
to dirt and disease
so that one day
we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold
like martians in War of the Worlds.
I believe that the greatest poets of the last century
were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis,
that jade is dried dragon sperm,
and that thousands of years ago
in a former life
I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.
I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars.
I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid,
that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly,
that light is a wave and a particle,
that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time
(although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it
it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead),
and that there are stars in the universe
billions of years older than the universe itself.
I believe in a personal god who cares about me
and worries
and oversees everything I do.
I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion
and went off to hang with her girlfriends
and doesn’t even know that I’m alive.
I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos,
background noise,
and sheer blind luck.
I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly.
I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too.
I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies.
I believe in a woman’s right to choose,
a baby’s right to live,
that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty
if you can trust the legal system implicitly,
and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system
with anything of relative importance;
much less matters of life and death.
I believe that life is a game,
that life is a cruel joke,
and that life is what happens when you’re alive
and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”
[ Neil Gaiman – American Gods ]
[ All credit to verdigris jane, whose lovely picture may be found here. ]
“(And the girl said:)
>How should we be able to forget
those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples,
the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses;
perhaps
all the dragons of our lives are princesses,
who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.
Perhaps
everything terrible is
in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
So you must not be frightened,
dear Mr. Kappus,
if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen;
if a restiveness,
like light and cloud-shadows,
passes over your hands and over all you do.
You must think that something is happening with you,
that life has not forgotten you,
that it holds you in its hand;
it will not let you fall. . . .<”
[ All credit to Maria@through my eyes/busy – off and on, whose lovely picture may be found here. ]
“In the world of the dreamer there was solitude:
all the exaltations and joys came in the moment of preparation for living.
They took place in solitude.
But with action came anxiety,
and the sense of insuperable effort made to match the dream,
and with it came weariness,
discouragement,
and the flight into solitude again.
And then in solitude,
in the opium den of remembrance,
the possibility of pleasure again.”
[ Anaïs Nin ]
