Now, you are going to tell me your story.... Tell me your sad-assed story all night. When you understand that what you're telling me is just a story. It isn't happening anymore. When you realize the story you're telling is just words, when you can just crumble it up and throw your past in the trashcan, then we'll figure out who you're going to be.

~BRANDY ALEXANDER

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest--whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories--comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.

~ALBERT CAMUS

The Messiah will only come when He is no longer needed.

~FRANZ KAFKA

Look, if someone has a once-in-a-lifetime year; well, maybe that's all it was, once-in-a-lifetime. ... You don't ever want to get ahead of yourself. You never want to heap praise on a player too early. There's a lot of truth to the notion of paying your dues.

~BRETT FAVRE

I sucked.

~KERRY COLLINS, after Super Bowl XXXV

What a terrible thing is wisdom when it brings no profit to the wise.

~LOUIS CYPHRE

A good man can be stupid and still be good. But a bad man must have brains.

~MAXIM GORKY

Don't take the Buddha for the Ultimate. As I look at him, he is still the hole in the privy.

~LIN-CHI

Authority allows two roles: the torturer and the tortured, twists people into joyless mannequins that fear and hate while culture plunges into the abyss.

~V

Once going to war was a dangerous undertaking, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries the reverse is true - at least for the combatants. During Operation Desert Storm, if the US military personnel involved had stayed in continental USA, more would have died in car accidents and homicides than were killed in the conflict itself.

~JOHN GEARSON

People, in general, have a tendency to make a good thing suck, and they also tend to be redundant.

~FALCO McKEE

I play a lot of good shots, then all of a sudden I turn into a mental midget.

~JOHN ELWAY

I bow to fornicators discontented with their wives;
I bow to crooked speech and lying talk;
I bow to ungrateful children;
I bow to wearers of the cloth who break their vows;
I bow to professors attached to their words;
I bow to tramps who reject a home;
I bow to the bums of insatiate whores.

~PARTIAL LITANY OF RASCAL TIBETAN SAINT DRUKPA

The morning glory!
But this too
Can never be my friend.

~BASHO

Life is like everything because it is nothing.

~FALCO McKEE

Oh, that Rome had but one neck!

~GAIUS CAESAR AUGUSTUS GERMANICUS

Reading is the basics for all learning.

~G.W. BUSH

As technology improves and expands, literacy declines.

~LYNN AGRESS

God can either remove evil from the world and won't, or He is willing to do so but can't, or He is both able and willing. If He has the will to remove evil and can't, then He isn't omnipotent. If He can but doesn't, then He's not good. If He is neither able nor willing, then He isn't omnipotent or good. Finally, if He is able and willing to remove evil but doesn't, why really bother about Him and His absurd cosmic game?

~FALCO McKEE

America's immersion in television is not to be taken as an attempt by a malevolent government or an avaricious corporate state to employ the age-old trick of distracting the masses with circuses. The problem is not that TV presents the masses with entertaining subject matter, but that television presents all subject matter as entertaining.

~NEIL POSTMAN

Where can I find a man who has forgotten words? I would like to have a word with him.

~CHUANG-TZU

The joke, of course, is that Internet sex is not sex at all, only typing.

~PATRICK BATEMAN

As for "Individualism" and "Non-conformity," one has only to compare the writings of such men as Jefferson, Monroe, Madison, Ethan Allen, and Tom Paine with the almost daily propaganda of the new Conservatives to realize how far backwards from the time of the founders of the nation and its first thinkers we have gone in recent times.

~GEORGE SELDES

A flower falls even though we love it,
and a weed grows even though we don't love it.

~DOGEN

Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.

~SETH THOMAS

I have discovered that all of man's unhappiness derives from only one source--not being able to sit quietly in a room.

~BLAISE PASCAL

Fear is
worse
than death,
and
it will
kill you.

~FALCO McKEE

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

~"RESUME"
DOROTHY PARKER

A sudden, bold and unexpected question doth many times surprise a man and lay him open.

~FRANCIS BACON

So rigid, brittle
fragility impersoned
Saturday afternoon

~THE JAVA SUTRA

On a long enough time line, everyone's survival rate drops to zero.

~CHUCK PALAHNIUK

Buddha don't care none--
girly lips, androgynous,
snail-encrusted pate

~FALCO McKEE

You have to eat, sleep, and shit--
That's unavoidable--
Beyond that is none of your business.

~PATRUL RINPOCHE

DEAR JOHN:
In analyzing the 1963 season, our record of eight wins and six losses was very much indicative of the way we played--a third-place football team. Any ballplayer that is satisfied with that record and third place should stay home and not report to training camp.

My biggest disappointment in 1963 was the inability to win the big games or the games that would have turned our season around--two losses to the Bears, two to the Packers, and the opening-day loss to the Giants. In these ball games a big play by either an offensive or defensive player at the right time could have made us a winner. Instead, we had the big letdown, and the other team made the play that won the game.

From our opening-day loss until the end of the season, we fought a continued uphill battle to get over the .500 mark. This cannot happen again; we must get off fast and be in contention, and when the big games come up we must win.

In order to make us better, I think each and every one should decide right now that 1964 has to be our year. Report to camp in the best shape ever. Be willing to sacrifice and pay any price that is necessary to make you the best, and in turn, us the best.

This training camp is going to be a tough, hard-hitting one with two objectives:
(1) to come up with our forty best players, and
(2) to get off to a flying start.

If you are not ready to go, both mentally and physically, when camp opens, it will only hinder your chances of being one of the '64 Colts.

This year, at last, I'm going to insist on a low reporting weight. Your weight will be 196. If you do not meet your reporting weight, your case will be discussed, and if you are not at the weight by Saturday A. M., July 25, the fine thereafter will be $10 per pound per day. Reporting overweight only indicates reporting "not ready."

We all feel that during the second half of the 1963 season we were the best team in pro football. We had winning momentum. Unfortunately, half a season is not enough. In 1964, we go all out for the World's Championship.

Sincerely,
Don Shula
Head Coach

The most beautiful order of the world is still a random gathering of things insignificant in themselves.

~HERAKLEITOS

Let that which does not matter truly slide.

~"JACK"

AN ESTIMATION OF THE SCIENCES AND OTHER SYSTEMATIC IDOLATORS:
"Medicine and Philosophy: household remedies and old wives' tales rearranged."

~ARTHUR RIMBAUD

The two great motivators are greed and hate.

Everybody wants more. Everybody hates someone. And why do you hate them? More likely than not, it's because they are in your way, or have something you want.

~PATRICK BATEMAN

It is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing. Everything begins with lucid indifference.

~ALBERT CAMUS

Life is bitter and fatal, yet people cherish it and beget children to suffer the same fate.

~HERAKLEITOS

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

~"THE RED WHEELBARROW"
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

To experience the mysterious is to know true art and true science.

~CLARK NOVA

Monastery gate
huge wooden bolt
fragrant wind

~MITSU SUZUKI

HER DIARY:
He was in an odd mood when I got to the bar. I thought it might have been because I was a bit late but he didn't say anything much about it. The conversation was quite slow going so I thought we should go off somewhere more intimate so we could talk more privately. So we went to this restaurant and he's STILL acting a bit funny and I'm trying to cheer him up and start to wonder whether it's me or something else. I ask him, and he says no. But you know I'm not really sure. So anyway, in the cab back to his house, I say that I love him and he just puts his arm around me. I don't know what the hell this means because you know he doesn't say it back or anything. We finally get back to his place and I'm wondering if he's going to dump me! So I try to ask him about it but he just switches on the TV. Reluctantly, I say I'm going to go to sleep. Then, after about 10 minutes, he joins me and we make love. But, he still seemed really distracted, so afterwards I just wanted to leave. I don't know--I just don't know, what he thinks anymore. . . . I mean, do you think he's met someone else???

HIS STORY:
Lousy day at work. Tired. Got laid though.

~UNKNOWN

In the middle of the road there
was a stone
there was a stone in the middle
of the road
there was a stone
in the middle of the road there
was a stone.

Never should I forget this event
in the life of my fatigued retinas.
Never should I forget that in the
middle of the road
there was a stone
there was a stone in the middle
of the road
in the middle of the road there
was a stone.

~NO MEIO DO CAMINHO "In the Middle of the Road,"
CARLOS DRUMMOND DE ANDRADE, Elizabeth Bishop, trans.

We are all self-composting.

~CHUCK PALAHNIUK

Character is fate.

~HERAKLEITOS

Now that ceaseless exposure has calloused us to the lewd and the vulgar, it is instructive to see what still seems wicked to us. What still slaps the clammy flab of our submissive consciousness hard enough to get our attention?

~THOMAS HARRIS

O! for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!

~JOHN KEATS

TEN THINGS I HATE

I Hate False Hope.
Don't tell me everything will be fine when you know in advance that it won't.

I Hate Bad Service.
You're an Actor, fine. Go sleep with a Producer, and allow a trained professional to filet my Salmon.

I Hate People Who Refer To Themselves In The Third Person.
It's only acceptable if you're already dead, as in the opening scene of "Sunset Boulevard."

I Hate Davis Ferguson.
I believe I've already touched on that.

I Hate Bad Albee.
Don't bring up your inner demons to share with the others at the table. We really don't care to know if you're afraid of Virginia Woolf. Stay home and freak out. Buy a Chainsaw.

I Hate The Work of Jean Michel Basquiat.
Let's see what he could do sober.

I Hate Politicians Who Comb Over Their Bald Spots.
If you are going to lie about the state of your own head, how can anybody trust anything you have to say about anything important?

I Hate False Modesty.
Why bother?

I Hate Beggars.
They CAN be choosers, like in choose to get a job.

I Hate Not Being Understood.
Do I make myself clear?

I Hate Davis Ferguson.
All right, that's 11.

~PATRICK BATEMAN

Looney is a loner, a rugged individualist, and a little bit flaky.

~JOHN UNITAS

A new arrival said apologetically to Chao-chou: "I have come here empty-handed!"
Chao-chou said: "Lay it down, then!"
"Since I have brought nothing with me, what can I lay down?" asked the visitor.
"Then go on carrying it!" said the Master.

~ZEN MONDO

pain is absurd
because it exists, nothing more

~CHARLES BUKOWSKI

Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

~GEORGE HERBERT

When you boil rice, know that the water is your own life.

~ZEN SAYING

When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?

~CHUCK PALAHNIUK

Liberal is the opposite of literal.

~FALCO McKEE

My problem came from being a young man with a lot of money in Manhattan. As a direct result of my position and perceived good fortune, the word NO did not apply to me. Can I have this suit, this phone, this girl? YES. This drug, this apartment, this deal? YES! This car, this table, this stretch of oceanfront? YES! Could I change the boundaries that define society? Could I create my own set of rules and live by them? YES. YES! Everything but NO! Was I searching all this time for that someone who would finally say NO to me?

No.

~PATRICK BATEMAN

A bow is alive only when it kills.

~HERAKLEITOS

Men are jerks. Women are psychotic.

~KILGORE TROUT

broken bowl
the pieces
still rocking

~P. HARTER

We assign a moment to decision, to dignify the process as a timely result of rational and conscious thought. But decisions are made of kneaded feelings; they are more often a lump than a sum.

~THOMAS HARRIS

An answer is always a form of death.

~JOHN FOWLES

I need solitude for my writing, not like a hermit, but like a dead man.

~FRANZ KAFKA