Thread: Memorable Passages

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: for thou art with me;
thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:
thou anointest my head with oil;
my cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

(from Psalm 23)

“Percy had never owned a ball or a glove or a bat, had never played catch with his dad, had never dreamed of beating the Yankees. In fact he'd probably never dreamed of leaving the cotton patch. That thought was almost overwhelming.”

― John Grisham, A Painted House

"The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank...sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world." ~ Carroll Quigley, Tragedy & Hope

^ That is not a conspiracy theory, either. Here in Australia, recently we had a Royal Commission (an in-depth formal investigation) into the banking industry, and the findings about their rapacity disgusted everyone.

If you click on the link below and it doesn't work, just copy and paste it into Google. ABC links have had a problem lately.

https://www.xxx.xxx.xx/news/2018-09-...dings/10317752

^just replace the xxx.xxx.xx with a b c. n e t. a u (without the spaces) in any browser to make it work. A quote from that:

"Much if not all of the conduct identified in the first round of hearings can be traced to entities preferring pursuit of profit to pursuit of any other purpose," he observed.

"Compliance appeared to have been relegated to a cost of doing business.

"And, the case studies undertaken in the first round of hearings showed, that there had been occasions when profit has been allowed to trump compliance with the law, and many more occasions where profit trumped doing the right thing by customers."

It is the wine that leads me on,
the wild wine
that sets the wisest man to sing
at the top of his lungs,
laugh like a fool – it drives the
man to dancing... it even
tempts him to blurt out stories
better never told.

― Homer, The Odyssey

I will remember the kisses
our lips raw with love
and how you gave me
everything you had
and how I
offered you what was left of
me,

and I will remember your small room
the feel of you
the light in the window
your records
your books
our morning coffee
our noons our nights
our bodies spilled together
sleeping

the tiny flowing currents
immediate and forever
your leg my leg
your arm my arm
your smile and the warmth
of you
who made me laugh
again.

― Charles Bukowski

“Baby, in a couple of minutes I'm going to rip off your god damned panties and show you some turkey neck you'll remember all the way to the graveside. I have a vast and curved penis, like a sickle, and many a gutted pussy has gasped come upon my callous and roach-smeared rug. First let me finish this drink.”

― Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man

“When I left home, Bo was six years old. He was our only child, but we were planning more. The math is easy, and I’ve done it a million times. He’ll be sixteen when I get out, a fully grown teenager, and I will have missed ten of the most precious years a father and son can have.

Until they are about twelve years old, little boys worship their fathers and believe they can do no wrong. I coached Bo in T-ball and youth soccer, and he followed me around like a puppy. We fished and camped, and he sometimes went to my office with me on Saturday mornings, after a boys-only breakfast.

He was my world, and trying to explain to him that I was going away for a long time broke both our hearts. Once behind bars, I refused to allow him to visit me. As much as I wanted to squeeze him, I could not stand the thought of that little boy seeing his father incarcerated.”

― John Grisham, The Racketeer

“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. “Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.”

― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

“An hour later my porpoises are back. Two of them start spinning in the air like corkscrews. I rush to get the camera, stowed in its locker—too late; they are leaving already. I am as disgusted as if I had dropped an anchor without shackling it to its chain.

After missing the terrific shot of the barracuda catching the flying fish in mid-air, I had sworn to leave the Beaulieu in the cockpit during fair weather, all set to go, with a cloth to protect it from the sun. But that is not enough. I am starting to realize that I too need to be protected from the camera.

In the beginning, I thought that you just set the lens and released the shutter. It is not like that at all. You have to give the camera something more. And now it is trying to suck my blood. It would be easy to stuff the camera in a waterproof tank and forget it exists, but it is too late—and in any case I am not sorry.”

― Bernard Moitessier, The Long Way

“The individual does actually carry on a double existence: one designed to serve his own purposes and another as a link in a chain, in which he serves against, or at any rate without, any volition of his own.”

― Sigmund Freud

“Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances.

On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off forever from everything you had known once - somewhere - far away in another existence perhaps.

There were moments when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect.”

― Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“To me, nudity is a joke. I don't think nude people are very attractive at all.
I like my women fully clothed. I like to imagine what might be under there. It
might not be the standard thing.

Imagine, stripping a woman down, and she has
a body like a little submarine. With periscope, propellers, torpedoes. That would
be the one for me. I'd marry her right off and be faithful to the end.”

- Charles Bukowski

“Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn't even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.”

― Heraclitus

“Human love, human trust, are always perilous, because they break down. The greater the love, the greater the trust, and the greater the peril, the greater the disaster. Because to place absolute trust on another human being is in itself a disaster, both ways, since each human being is a ship that must sail its own course, even if it go in company with another ship.... And yet, love is the greatest thing between human beings.”

― D H Lawrence

“This was 1941 and I'd been in prison eleven years. I was thirty-five. I'd spent the best years of my life either in a cell or in a black-hole. I'd only had seven months of total freedom with my Indian tribe. The children my Indian wives must have had by me would be eight years old now.

How terrible! How quickly the time had flashed by! But a backward glance showed all these hours and minutes studding my calvary as terribly long, and each one of them hard to bear.”

― Henri Charrière, Papillon

“But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony--Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?”

― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

“When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.”

― Mark Twain

“I came into the world with two priceless advantages: good health and a love of learning. When I left school at the age of fifteen I was halfway through the tenth grade. I left for two reasons, economic necessity being the first of them. More important was that school was interfering with my education.”

― Louis L'Amour, Education of a Wandering Man

“It's come at last," she thought, "the time when you can no longer stand between your children and heartache. When there wasn't enough food in the house you pretended that you weren't hungry so they could have more.

In the cold of a winter's night you got up and put your blanket on their bed so they wouldn't be cold. You'd kill anyone who tried to harm them - I tried my best to kill that man in the hallway. Then one sunny day, they walk out in all innocence and they walk right into the grief that you'd give your life to spare them from.”

― Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

I often wonder if you wrote your memoir today, if your life story would be lived on the edge of possibility, if you held wonder in one hand and courage in the other and truly believed that anything was possible.

- Jean Houston

“I have an unfortunate character; whether it is my upbringing that made me like that or God who created me so, I do not know. I know only that if I cause unhappiness to others, I myself am no less happy. I realize this is poor consolation for them - but the fact remains that it is so.

In my early youth, after leaving the guardianship of my parents, I plunged into all the pleasures money could buy, and naturally these pleasures grew distasteful to me. Then I went into high society, but soon enough grew tired of it; I fell in love with beautiful society women and was loved by them, but their love only aggravated my imagination and vanity while my heart remained desolate...

I began to read and to study, but wearied of learning, too; I saw that neither fame nor happiness depended on it in the slightest, for the happiest people were the ignorant, and fame was a matter of luck, to achieve which you only had to be shrewd...”

― Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time

“What of it? If I die, I die. It will be no great loss to the world, and I am thoroughly bored with life. I am like a man yawning at a ball; the only reason he does not go home to bed is that his carriage has not arrived yet.”

― Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time