Sunday, February 21, 2010

This is not the sound of a new man or crispy realization
It's the sound of the unlocking and the lift away
Your love will be
Safe with me

Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), Stacks.

Friday, February 19, 2010

If someone with a sharp axe
hacks off the boughs of a great oak tree,
and spoils its handsome shape;
although its fruit has failed, yet it can give an account of itself
if it come later to a winter fire
or if it rests on the pillars of some palace
and does a sad task among foreign walls
when there is nothing left in the place it comes from.

Pindar's Fourth Pythian Ode as translated by Bernard Williams
and quoted in Charles Freeman's magisterial Egypt, Greece and Rome

Tuesday, February 02, 2010

How great the barriers can be between a person and his happiness,
How little it can take to make them seem small.

Marisa Silver (paraphrased)

Monday, January 18, 2010

After years of waiting nothing came
As your life flashed before your eyes
You realize

I'm a reasonable man
Get off my case

Radiohead, Packt Like Sardines

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Tell us what we did wrong and you can blame us for it.

Andrew Bird, Heretics.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

"This shit would be really interesting if we weren't in the middle of it."

Barack Obama, September 2008 (as quoted in Game Change).

Monday, December 07, 2009

When you get there, you get there and that's the way it goes.

Otis Taylor

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

What experience and history teach is this: people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

G.W.F. Hegel

Monday, November 09, 2009

Can you imagine 4,000 years passing, and you're not even a memory? Think about it, friends. It's not just a possibility. It is a certainty.

Jean Shepherd

Saturday, September 19, 2009

You can only take what you can carry.

Snow Patrol

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

The history of the world is the history of a ten-thousand-year war of brains between the rich and the poor. Each side is eternally trying to hoodwink the other side: and it has been this way since the start of time. The poor win a few battles...but of course the rich have won the war for ten thousand years.

Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

[E]veryone wants to be the center of the universe.

Colin Negrych as quoted by Nick Palmgarten

[A] mortal soul, the non-corporeal essence of ourselves lurking within our flesh...flourishing when we flourish, and dying when we die.

Salman Rushdie, "In the South"

Both in the May 18, 2009 New Yorker.

Sunday, August 02, 2009

From now on, you are you.


Mahmoud Darwish, From Now On You Are You

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Whatever destiny demands of us, we and only we can decide whether to endure with noble fortitude or not. We do not wish for evils, but we can endure them.

John C. Wright, The Golden Age

Wednesday, July 08, 2009

And I think it's gonna be a long long time
Till touch down brings me round again to find
I'm not the man they think I am at home
Oh no no no, I'm a rocket man

Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone
And I think it's gonna be a long long time...

Elton John, Rocket Man

Monday, June 01, 2009

The great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

Saturday, May 30, 2009

I do not want this world. I do not like this world. I do not need this world. I do not need to feel sympathetic for this world or its inhabitants. If only they did not need me...

A fictional agent of the UN Security Council in Singularity Sky by Charles Stross

Saturday, May 23, 2009

The God of Small Things....If he touched her, he couldn't talk to her, if he loved her he couldn't leave, if he spoke he couldn't listen, if he fought he couldn't win.

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

No beast has essayed the boundless, infinitely inventive art of human hatred. No beast can match its range and power.

Arundhati Roy
, The God of Small Things

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed.


William Gibson