The Surprising Interplay of Basic Forces

A collection of direct quotes from reading today.

Found Poem March 13, 2011

I hold the cigarette in my mouth the entire time,
and with the feather boa involved,
there's a sense of danger.

Architects all want to be
philosophers or artists now.
I think they love to hate me.

It was an emotional catastrophe at the time,
being conceived from the inside out,
the fashion industry's disdain for
the great, unwashed masses,
enabling clients to buy shadows of shadows,
sixteen shades of gray.

Over and over complexity from the simplest of rules,
beauty from the surprising interplay of basic forces.
Those are the kinds of patterns that catch my attention.
That turned out to be a fatal miscalculation.

Why are you suddenly awake?

The kind of conversations that
I want to be having
occur best in daytime,
This is a little more challenging —   
and a lot better.

The Same Source

“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there.”

~ Henry Miller, from Sexus

Full

“The best you can hope for is to live in a present so full and all-encompassing that you lose any sense of future or past.”

~ From the Teeth of Angels, by Jonathan Carroll

Which is the Real One?

"There are times when I look over the various parts of my character with perplexity. I recognize that I am made up of several persons and that the person that at the moment has the upper hand will inevitably give place to another. But which is the real one? All of them or none?”

~ W. Somerset Maugham

Neil Jenman has the largest private collection of Somerset Maugham books and memorabilia in the world.

Ethical Alchemy

"I say that religion isn't about believing things. It's ethical alchemy. It's about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness."

~ Karen Armstrong

Speak Up

@JSCarroll

A Little Flower

“Just living is not enough. One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.”

~ Hans Christian Andersen

[Thanks Kirstin!]

To See What Was Going On

"I did it for the fun. I was a young girl and everybody had left and it was wartime. You didn't want to get stuck in a hole in Iowa; you wanted to see what was going on."

~ Margaret Phelan Taylor, on her experience as a Women Airforce Service Pilot, “Female WWII Pilots: The Original Fly Girls,” Morning Edition (3/9/10)

On Your Way to Wonderful

Still Bill

 

"It's okay to head out for wonderful, but on your way to wonderful, you're going to have to pass through all right, and when you get to all right, take a good look around and get used to it, because that may be as far as you're gonna go."

~ Bill Withers, from “Still Bill: Documenting a Soul Icon,” All Things Considered (March 4, 2010)

Twitter Wisdom

“The biggest (& hardest) lesson Ive learned in life is that the external world is just a reflection of the world w/in.” ~Tony Hsieh, @zappos

Another World

"Il y a un autre monde mais il est dans celui-ci."

~ Paul Éluard

Talking of Power and Love
by Paul Éluard

Between all my torments between death and self
Between my despair and the reason for living
There is injustice and this evil of men
That I cannot accept there is my anger

There are the blood-coloured fighters of Spain
There are the sky-coloured fighters of Greece
The bread the blood the sky and the right to hope
For all the innocents who hate evil

The light is always close to dying
Life always ready to become earth
But spring is reborn that is never done with
A bud lifts from dark and the warmth settles

And the warmth will have the right of the selfish
Their atrophied senses will not resist
I hear the fire talk lightly of coolness
I hear a man speak what he has not known

You who were my flesh’s sensitive conscience
You I love forever you who made me
You will not tolerate oppression or injury
You’ll sing in dream of earthly happiness
You’ll dream of freedom and I’ll continue you

Life Passions

"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and the unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind."

~ Bertrand Russell

 

[Thanks Alex!]

A Continual State of Surprise

“So strange, life is. Why people do not go around in a continual state of surprise is beyond me.”

~ William Maxwell

Looking

"I think the process of looking is a joyful thing."

~ David Hockney

Drawings by David Hockney, made with the Brushes application on his iPhone, 2009.

Caricatures

"So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say Moslems and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression."

~ Edward Saïd, writing in 1980

Reading

"The main effort of arranging your life should be to progressively reduce the amount of time required to decently maintain yourself so that you can have all the time you want for reading."

~ Norman Rush

Writing

"The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work."

~ Augusten Burroughs

Extemporizing

"It is safer to accept any chance that offers itself, and extemporize a procedure to fit it, than to get a good plan matured, and wait for a chance of using it."

~ Thomas Hardy, from Far from the Madding Crowd

[Thanks Linda!]

Life is an Experiment

“Life consists in penetrating the unknown, and fashioning our actions in accord with the new knowledge thus acquired.”

~ Leo Tolstoy, from The Kingdom of God Is within You

“Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions.  All life is an experiment.  The more experiments you make, the better.  What if they are a little coarse, and you may get your coat soiled or torn?  What if you do fail, and get fairly rolled in the dirt once or twice?  Up again, you shall nevermore be so afraid of a tumble again.”

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Journals, November 11, 1842

“Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.”

~ Anaïs Nin, from D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study

“What is a scientist after all? It is a curious [person] looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what's going on."

~ Jacques Cousteau, from The Christian Science Monitor, July 21, 1971

“The greater one's science, the deeper the sense of mystery.”

~ Vladimir Nabokov, from Strong Opinions

"Everybody's a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We're all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos."

~ David Cronenberg, from Cronenberg on Cronenberg

Legislators

"Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

~Percy Bysshe Shelley