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

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

Andrew Bird, Heretics.

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

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

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

Otis Taylor

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

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

You can only take what you can carry.

Snow Patrol

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

[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.

From now on, you are you.


Mahmoud Darwish, From Now On You Are You

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


William Gibson

It's just another day in paradise
As you stumble to your bed
You'd give anything to silence
Those voices ringing in your head
You thought you could find happiness
Just over that green hill
You thought you would be satisfied
But you never will-
Learn to be still

We are like sheep without a shepherd
We don't know how to be alone
So we wander 'round this desert
And wind up following the wrong gods home
But the flock cries out for another
And they keep answering that bell
And one more starry-eyed messiah
Meets a violent farewell-
Learn to be still
Learn to be still

Now the flowers in your garden
They don't smell so sweet so sweet
Maybe you've forgotten
The heaven lying at your feet

There are so many contradictions
In all these messages we send
(We keep asking)
How do I get out of here?
Where do I fit in?
Though the world is torn and shaken
Even if your heart is breakin'
It's waiting for you to awaken
And someday you will-
Learn to be still
Learn to be still

You just keep on runnin'
Keep on runnin'

The Eagles, Learn to be Still

You, who are on the road must have a code that you can live by.
And so become yourself because the past is just a good bye.

CSN&Y, Teach Your Children

The latest findings highlight once again the extent to which obesity is a consequence of Homo sapiens carrying into an era of abundance, leisure and warmth the physiology that humans evolved in a world marked by barely enough food, constant physical activity and dangerous cold.

From a Washington Post article on brown fat.