Thread: Memorable Passages

Friends are like BOOBS. Some are big, some are small, some are real, and some are fake.

Sometimes, the wrong choices bring us to the right places.

We live in the era of smart phones and stupid people.

“Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas ... with the music at top volume and at least a pint of ether.”

― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“The greatest mania of all is passion: and I am a natural slave to passion: the balance between my brain and my soul and my body is as wild and delicate as the skin of a Ming vase.”

― Hunter S. Thompson, The Curse of Lono

“Major Major had been born too late and too mediocre. Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.”

― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

That's some catch that catch 22

“It was obvious that he was a man who marched through life to the rhythms of some drum I would never hear.”

― Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga

“A mistake constantly made by those who should know better is to judge people of the past by our standards rather than their own. The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.”

― Louis L'Amour, Education of a Wandering Man

I would have
loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a
cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom,
but that didn’t happen.

― Charles Bukowski

“Marrying a woman for her beauty makes no more sense than eating a bird for its singing. But it's a common mistake nonetheless.”

― Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

“There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death.

They don't honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton.

They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly.

Play them the great music of the centuries and they can't hear it. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.”

― Charles Bukowski

Alcohol is not the answer, it just makes you forget the question.

Men say that women should come with instructions. What's the point of all that? Have you ever seen a man actually read the instructions?

Men who don't understand women fall into two groups: Bachelors and Husbands.

“Teresina went often to confession. She was the despair of Father Ramon. Indeed he had seen that while her knees, her hands, and her lips did penance for an old sin, her modest and provocative eyes, flashing under drawn lashes, laid the foundation for a new one.”

― John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat

Cheating is not an accident. Falling off a bike is an accident. You just don't trip and fall into a vagina.....

As if you were on fire from within.
The moon lives in the lining of your skin.

― Pablo Neruda

“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”

― Thomas Mann

“The dangers that we face are part of the process, now well underway, of the unification of the planet--in language, culture, science, and commerce. They are both driven by the identical technological advances--this critical and delicate time coincides with the widespread availability of nuclear weapons.

At the present rate of change, it seems likely that in the period between now and 2061, the turning point for the human species will have been reached.

If we survive until then, our passage to the next apparition of Halley's Comet should be comparatively easy. That perihelion passage will be in March 2134, when the comet will make an unusually close encounter with the Earth. It will come as close as 0.09AU or 14 million kilometers, less than half the distance of the 1910 encounter.

It will then be brighter than the brightest star. If there are those to do the commemorating, the years 2061 and 2134 should be celebrated for the courage, intelligence, and common purpose of a species forced by urgent necessity to come to its senses.”

― Carl Sagan, Comet

“The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art.”

― Federico García Lorca

For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.

― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

You watch the setting sun,
and your eyes shine,
oh, dragon of the frogs,
with a human radiance.
Ideas, gondolas without oars,
cross the shadowy
waters of your
burnt-out eyes.


Now the sun has dissolved
in the cup of the mountains,
and the flocks
cloud the roadway.
It is the hour to depart:
leave the dry path
and your meditations.
You will have time
to look at the stars
when the worms are eating you
at their leisure.

- Federico García Lorca, excerpts from The Old Lizard

"Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys."

- Alphonse de Lamartine

The Banker And The Cobbler


There was a cobbler once, who sang all day;
'Twas wonderful to see the man, and then
To hear him quavering away,
Happier than any of the Seven Wise Men!
His neighbor, on the contrary, who rolled
In heaps of gold,
Sung little and slept less; he had a bank;
And if, at times, near dawn, he ever sank
Into a doze, the cobbler, like a lark at
His singing, would not let him sleep a wink!
The banker grieved that heaven did not decree
Sleep to be bought and sold, at market,
Like meat and drink.

He had the singer brought to him; says he:
'Pray, Master Crispin, what's your yearly income?'
'Income!' the jolly cobbler cries, quite gay,
'I do not make my reckoning in that way,
With one day heaped on the other; but I think 'em
All right enough, if so it comes about,
I make both ends meet, when the twelvemonth's out;
The day just brings its daily bread always.'

'Well, what do you make a day?' the rich man says.

'Why, more or less; the worst--(and but for this,
Our gains would not be very much amiss)--
The worst is, we've so many holy days;
These saints' days almost ruin us outright,
Each festival impoverishes its brother;
And then our curate does take such delight
In finding for us some new saint or other.'

The banker laughed at his free, simple way.
'Crispin! I'll make a king of you today;
Look at these hundred crowns; I give you these:
Go, use them as you please!'

The cobbler thought he handled all the ore
That had been dug, a hundred years or more,
For the whole world--he thought he had it all!
Then he went home to his own stall
And there he buried in a hole
His cash--and with it all his mirth of soul.

No more gay songs; he lost his voice in getting
What causes all our pains; sleep left his bed,
And the cares came instead,
Endless alarms, suspicions all-besetting.

By day his eyes glanced both ways, and by night
If any cat but mewed upon her rounds,
That cat was at the cash! At last the wight
Ran to the man whom he had ceased to wake;
'Give me,' he cries, 'my songs and sleep, and take--
Take back these hundred crowns!'

- Alphonse Marie Lois de Lamartine