Thread: Memorable Passages

“Bad luck doesn't have any chinks in it," he said with deep bitterness. "I was born a son of a bitch and I'm going to die a son of a bitch.”

― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

One thing you cannot know:
The sudden extinction of every alternative,
The unexpected crash of the iron cataract.
You do not know what hope is, until you have lost it.
You only know what it is not to hope:
You do not know what it is to have hope taken from you
Or to fling it away, to join the legion of the hopeless
Unrecognized by other men, though sometimes by each other.

― T.S. Eliot, The Family Reunion

“When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would ease this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job.

Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage.

In other words, once a bum always a bum. I fear this disease incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself....A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”

― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.”

― Nikola Tesla

Sorry boys, but I already have my eyes on a guy that isn't interested.

Don't let anyone with bad eyebrows tell you anything about life.

“It was the essence of life to disbelieve in death for one's self, to act as if life would continue forever. And life had to act also as if little issues were big ones. To take a realistic attitude toward life and death meant that one lapsed into unreality. Into insanity. It was ironic that the only way to keep one's sanity was to ignore that one was in an insane world or to act as if the world were sane.”

― Philip José Farmer

Of course, life is a bitch. If it was a slut, it would be easy.

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong. -Mahatma Ghandi

^ Welcome to the Buffalo Board...

Lang may yer lum reek...

“He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her.

Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more and more as she felt his love increasing, and that was how in the ripeness of autumn she began to believe once more in the youthful superstition that poverty was the servitude of love.

Both looked back then on the wild revelry, the gaudy wealth, and the unbridled fornication as an annoyance and they lamented that it had cost them so much of their lives to find the paradise of shared solitude.

Madly in love after so many years of sterile complicity, they enjoyed the miracle of living each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out people they kept on blooming like little children and playing together like dogs.”

― Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

“Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.”

― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window panes;

There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.


- T.S. Eliot, Prufrock

a woman, a
tire that’s flat, a
disease, a
desire: fears in front of you,
fears that hold so still
you can study them
like pieces on a
chessboard…

it’s not the large things that
send a man to the
madhouse. death he’s ready for, or
murder, incest, robbery, fire, flood…

no, it’s the continuing series of small tragedies
that send a man to the
madhouse…

not the death of his love
but a shoelace that snaps
with no time left …

- from The Shoelace, Bukowski

Thanks for the welcome..BB.. Just a few quotes I like.


Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing. - Hellen Keller

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.
- W.Sommerset Maugham

A traveler is really not someone who crosses ground so much as someone who is always hungry for the next challenge and adventure. - Pico Iyer

Oh! The Places You’ll Go!

You’ll be on your way up!
You’ll be seeing great sights!
You’ll join the high fliers who soar to high heights.

You won’t lag behind, because you’ll have the speed. You’ll pass the whole gang and you’ll soon take the lead. Wherever you fly, you’ll be best of the best. Wherever you go, you will top all the rest.

Except when you don’t.
Because, sometimes, you won’t.

You’ll get mixed up, of course, as you already know. You’ll get mixed up with many strange birds as you go. So be sure when you step. Step with care and great tact and remember that Life’s a Great Balancing Act. Just never forget to be dexterous and deft. And never mix up your right foot with your left.

- from Dr Seuss, Oh The Places You'll Go

“Trouble with a long journey like this," continued the Captain, "is that you end up just talking to yourself a lot, which gets terribly boring because half the time you know what you’re going to say next.”

― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

“It's not Americans I find annoying; it's Americanism: a social disease of the postindustrial world that must inevitably infect each of the mercantile nations in turn, and is called 'American' only because your nation is the most advanced case of the malady, much as one speaks of Spanish flu, or Japanese Type-B encephalitis.

Its symptoms are a loss of work ethic, a shrinking of inner resources, and a constant need for external stimulation, followed by spiritual decay and moral narcosis.

You can recognize the victim by his constant efforts to get in touch with himself, to believe his spiritual feebleness is an interesting psychological warp, to construe his fleeing from responsibility as evidence that he and his life are uniquely open to new experiences. In the later stages, the sufferer is reduced to seeking that most trivial of human activities: fun.”

― Trevanian, Shibumi

"He wrapped himself in quotations- as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors."
-- Kipling

Although bullshit is common in everyday life and has attracted attention from philosophers, its reception (critical or ingenuous)
has not, to our knowledge, been subject to empirical investigation. Here we focus on pseudo-profound bullshit, which
consists of seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous. We presented
participants with bullshit statements consisting of buzzwords randomly organized into statements with syntactic structure but
no discernible meaning (e.g., “Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena”). Across multiple studies, the propensity to judge bullshit
statements as profound was associated with a variety of conceptually relevant variables (e.g., intuitive cognitive style,
supernatural belief). Parallel associations were less evident among profundity judgments for more conventionally profound
(e.g., “A wet person does not fear the rain”) or mundane (e.g., “Newborn babies require constant attention”) statements. These
results support the idea that some people are more receptive to this type of bullshit and that detecting it is not merely a matter
of indiscriminate skepticism but rather a discernment of deceptive vagueness in otherwise impressive sounding claims. Our results
also suggest that a bias toward accepting statements as true may be an important component of pseudo-profound bullshit
receptivity.

-- Gordon Pennycook
Judgment and Decision Making

Volume 10, Number 6, November 2015

“Am I in the wrong place here, or in the wrong life? Did I not recognize, as I sat in a train that raced past a station and did not stop, that I was on the wrong train, and did I not learn from the conductor that the train would not stop at the next station, either, a hundred kilometers away, and did he not also admit to me, whispering with his hand shielding his mouth, that the train would not stop again at all?”

― Werner Herzog, Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo

“...If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!”

― Rudyard Kipling

“It is a poor sort of man who is content to be spoon-fed knowledge that has been filtered through the canon of religious or political belief, and it is a poor sort of man who will permit others to dictate what he may or may not learn.”

― Louis L'Amour, The Walking Drum