Thread: Memorable Passages

Sunrise, Sunset


Is this the little girl I carried?
Is this the little boy at play?
I don't remember growing older.
When did they?

When did she get to be a beauty?
When did he grow to be this tall?
Wasn't it yesterday when they were small?

Sunrise, sunset.
Sunrise, sunset.
Swiftly flow the days.
Seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers,
Blossoming even as we gaze.
Sunrise, sunset.
Sunrise, sunset.
Swiftly fly the years.
One season following another,
Laden with happiness and tears.

What words of wisdom can I give them?
How can I help to ease their way?
Now, they must learn from one another,
Day by day.

They look so natural together,
Just like two newlyweds should be.
Is there a canopy in store for me?

Sunrise, sunset.
Sunrise, sunset.
Swiftly flow the days.
Seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers,
Blossoming even as we gaze.
Sunrise, sunset.
Sunrise, sunset.
Swiftly fly the years.
One season following another,
Laden with happiness and tears


- Fiddler on the Roof, Zero Mostel (Written by Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick)

“The ass tells you everything about a woman, her character, her temperament, whether she is sanguine, morbid, gay or fickle, whether she is responsive or unresponsive, whether she is maternal or pleasure-loving, whether she is truthful or lying by nature.”

― Henry Miller, Sexus: The Rosy Crucifixion I

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.

It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”

― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“When we finally know we are dying, and all other sentient beings are dying with us, we start to have a burning, almost heartbreaking sense of the fragility and preciousness of each moment and each being, and from this can grow a deep, clear, limitless compassion for all beings.”

― Sogyal Rinpoche

“I was only a year and some odd months younger than Woloda, and from the first we had grown up and studied and played together. Hitherto, the difference between elder and younger brother had never been felt between us, but at the period of which I am speaking, I began to have a notion that I was not Woloda’s equal either in years, in tastes, or in capabilities.

I even began to fancy that Woloda himself was aware of his superiority and that he was proud of it, and, though, perhaps, I was wrong, the idea wounded my conceit — already suffering from frequent comparison with him. He was my superior in everything — in games, in studies, in quarrels, and in deportment. All this brought about an estrangement between us and occasioned me moral sufferings which I had never hitherto experienced.”

― Leo Tolstoy

“A man who has been through bitter experiences and travelled far enjoys even his sufferings after a time.”

― Homer, The Odyssey

“We need to be virtually bludgeoned into detachment from our daily lives, our habits and mental laziness, which conceal from us the strangeness of the world. Without a fresh virginity of mind, without a new and healthy awareness of existential reality, there can be no theatre and no art either; the real must be in a way dislocated, before it can be re-integrated.”

― Eugène Ionesco, Notes and Counternotes

Homeward Bound

I'm sitting in the railway station.
Got a ticket for my destination.
On a tour of one-night stands
my suitcase and guitar in hand.
And every stop is neatly planned
for a poet and a one-man band.

Homeward bound,
I wish I was homeward bound,
Home where my thought's escaping,
Home where my music's playing,
Home where my love lies waiting silently for me.

Every day's an endless stream
Of cigarettes and magazines.
And each town looks the same to me,
the movies and the factories
And every stranger's face I see
reminds me that I long to be,

Homeward bound,
I wish I was homeward bound,
Home where my thought's escaping,
Home where my music's playing,
Home where my love lies waiting silently for me.

Tonight I'll sing my songs again,
I'll play the game and pretend.
But all my words come back to me
in shades of mediocrity
Like emptiness in harmony
I need someone to comfort me.

Homeward bound,
I wish I was homeward bound,
Home where my thought's escaping,
Home where my music's playing,
Home where my love lies waiting silently for me.
Silently for me.

- Simon & Garfunkel

“Clouds overlaid the sky as with a shroud of mist, and everything looked sad, rainy, and threatening under a fine drizzle which was beating against the window-panes, and streaking their dull, dark surfaces with runlets of cold, dirty moisture. Only a scanty modicum of daylight entered to war with the trembling rays of the ikon lamp. The dying man threw me a wistful look, and nodded. The next moment he had passed away.”

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Poor Folk

“There is a crack in my soul, and I can hear it trembling, quivering, stirring deep inside me.”

― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Poor Folk

“America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself.”

― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“After dinner or lunch or whatever it was -- with my crazy 12-hour night I was no longer sure what was what -- I said, "Look, baby, I'm sorry, but don't you realize that this job is driving me crazy? Look, let's give it up. Let's just lay around and make love and take walks and talk a little. Let's go to the zoo. Let's look at animals. Let's drive down and look at the ocean. It's only 45 minutes. Let's play games in the arcades. Let's go to the races, the Art Museum, the boxing matches. Let's have friends. Let's laugh. This kind of life like everybody else's kind of life: it's killing us.”

― Charles Bukowski, Post Office

"When I look back on my past and think how much time I wasted on nothing, how much time has been lost in futilities, errors, laziness, incapacity to live; how little I appreciated it, how many times I sinned against my heart and soul - then my heart bleeds. Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute can be an eternity of happiness."

- Fyodor Dostoevsky

“A man would die tonight of lying out on the marshes, I thought. And then I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering multitude.”

― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Wisdom comes through suffering.
Trouble, with its memories of pain,
Drips in our hearts as we try to sleep,
So men against their will
Learn to practice moderation.
Favours come to us from gods.

― Aeschylus, Agamemnon

“Satire's nature is to be one-sided, contemptuous of ambiguity, and so unfairly selective as to find in the purity of ridicule an inarguable moral truth.”

― E.L. Doctorow

“Cosette, do you hear? He has come to that! He asks my forgiveness! And do you know what he has done for me, Cosette? He has saved my life. He has done more --he has given you to me. And after having saved me, and after having given you to me, Cosette, what has he done with himself? He has sacrificed himself. Behold the man.

And he says to me the ingrate, to me the forgetful, to me the pitiless, to me the guilty one: Thanks!

Cosette, my whole life passed at the feet of this man would be too little. That barricade, that sewer, that furnace, that cesspool,--all that he traversed for me, for thee, Cosette! He carried me away through all the deaths which he put aside before me, and accepted for himself. Every courage, every virtue, every heroism, every sanctity he possesses! Cosette, that man is an angel!”

― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

“Make no mistake: peaceful madmen are ahead of the future.”

― Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores

“Life is fragile and absurd.”

― Leo Tolstoy

“It's up to brave hearts, sir, to be patient when things are going badly, as well as being happy when they're going well ... For I've heard that what they call fortune is a flighty woman who drinks too much, and, what's more, she's blind, so she can't see what she's doing, and she doesn't know who she's knocking over or who she's raising up.”

― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

What an odd coincidence ! I just got Don Quixote out of the library today, after reading a book about Cervantes' life...

“There can be no doubt that the love of wealth and the spirit of moderation cannot exist together in citizens of the same state to any considerable extent; one or the other will be disregarded.”

― Plato, The Republic

“When I was all set to go, when I had my bags and all, I stood for a while next to the stairs and took a last look down the goddam corridor. I was sort of crying. I don't know why. I put my red hunting hat on, and turned the peak around to the back, the way I liked it, and then I yelled at the top of my goddam voice, "Sleep tight, ya morons!" I'll bet I woke up every bastard on the whole floor. Then I got the hell out. Some stupid guy had thrown peanut shells all over the stairs, and I damn near broke my crazy neck.”

― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Whoever you be, O my reader-
friend, foe- I wish with you
to part at present as a pal.
Farewell. Whatever you in my wake
sought in these careless strophes-
tumultuous recollections,
relief from labors,
live pictures or bons mots,
or faults of grammar-
God grant that you,
in this book,
for recreation, for the daydream,
for the heart, for jousts in journals,
may find at least a crumb.
Upon which, let us part, farewell!

― Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin

“The planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root it will far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, good or evil.”

― George Orwell