Thread: Memorable Passages

“Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home. Late in life, with indomitable courage, we continue to say that we are going to do what we have not yet done: we are going to build a house. This dream house may be merely a dream of ownership, the embodiment of everything that is considered convenient, comfortable, healthy, sound, desirable, by other people. It must therefore satisfy both pride and reason, two irreconcilable terms.”

― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“I gave them nothing back because all I knew was the vast amount they had taken from me, robbed me of, cheated me out of, all in the name of a God whose son bore the long hair none of us were allowed to wear any more.”

― Richard Wagamese, Ragged Company

"I'm twenty-three years old, I'm working graveyard in the fucking mine and I been there since I was sixteen. I'll be there until it kills me or I'm too fucking old. I ain't got no out. I don't mind that. I got Emma and I got the kids and I got the Moose until I'm too damn old for that too.

But someone reached down and put lightning bolts in your legs, Saul. Someone put thunder in your wrist shot and eyes in the back of your fucking head. You were made for this game. So you gotta give this a shot for all of us who're never gonna get out of Manitouwadge.”

― Richard Wagamese, Indian Horse

“To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.”

― Gaston Bachelard

“We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.”

― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

A displaced person’s conversation (part 2)

On days of cold sky pavements become field dykes
What’s pole-shouldered are sheaves of garish yellow
A gust of cold wind – the farmer’s son
Estranged from home comes to a halt looking at
The orange fish in his hand called Nemo
The weird big-eyed cat with sad glints in his eyes
Glum thoughts while waiting for the haggling
Sadness spreading over both eyes
In that gust – the spread of city buildings in splendorous sunlight
Turns into golden fields all over those very eyes

- Ungkarn Chantatip

“Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.'”

― Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

“I know we're not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don't know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don't care that we don't.”

― Dylan Thomas

Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.

A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.

If one bites the sharp corners off French fries they may safely be fed to young babies.

Aldo Speroni 1966

^Finally a quote that sums up my life!


I do like the idea of a quote thread, same same music threads, but it seems they always turn into threads where people make 15,000 posts a day in an attempt to show how erudite they are or how obscure and niche their tastes are. Is this how hipsters are conceived?

“Generally speaking, our prisoners were capable of loving animals, and if they had been allowed they would have delighted to rear large numbers of domestic animals and birds in the prison. And I wonder what other activity could better have softened and refined their harsh and brutal natures than this. But it was not allowed. Neither the regulations nor the nature of the prison made it possible.”


Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead

Originally Posted by blue

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead

I have actually read all that book and was astonished to learn that the prisoners had access to a kilo of meat per day. It was cold but life was not that bad. Actually, I only read it to be able say that I had read Dostoyevsky. I used to be pretentious but I am a rounded, lovely person now.

Embrace the glorious mess that you are.

BaitongBoy hows your Baht thread going ,

“Better to sleep in an uncomfortable bed free, than sleep in a comfortable bed unfree.”

". . .but the Republican and Democratic members sneered and jeered at him, and there was uproar and confusion. Ernest abrubtly changed front.

'I know nothing that I may say can influence you,' he said. 'You have no souls to be influenced. You are spineless, flaccid things. You pompously call yourselves Republicans and Democrats. There is no Republican Party. There is no Democrat Party. There are no Republicans nor Democrats in this House. You are lick-spittlers and panderers, the creatures of the Plutocracy. You talk verbosely in antiquated terminology of your love of liberty, and all the while you wear the scarlet livery of the Iron Heel.'"

Jack London, The Iron Heel(1907)

I don't have an attitude problem. I just have a personality you can't handle!

Being unique is better than being perfect.

My life is just like Rihanna's new song. Work... work... work... and the rest I can't really understand.

If you don't do a lot of stupid tings when you're young, you won't have funny things to talk about when you're old.

A jealous woman does better research than the FBI.

Friends are like condoms, they protect you when things get hard.