"If there were dreams to sell,
Merry and sad to tell,
And the crier rung his bell,
What would you buy?"
Thomas Lovell Beddoes, "Dream Pedlary"
"What day is today?" Aureliano told him that it was Tuesday. "I was thinking
the same thing," José Arcadio Buendia said, "but suddenly I realized that it's
still Monday, like yesterday. Look at the sky, look at the walls, look at the
begonias. Today is Monday too."
* * *
The restored passion was so pressing that on more than one occasion they would
look each other in the eyes as they were getting ready to eat and without
saying anything they would cover their plates and go into the bedroom dying of
hunger and of love.
* * *
"Don't you worry," she said, smiling. "Wherever she is right now, she's
waiting for you."
García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
"Sing, ye heavens, and earth, reply."
Charles Wesley
"Perhaps they were right in putting love into books . . . Perhaps it could not live anywhere else."
William Faulkner, Light in August
"Whom the gods destroy, they first make mad."
Euripides
"Yet each man kills the thing he loves."
Oscar Wilde
"Indoors, in the cool bedrooms saturated with incense, women protected themselves from the sun as if it were a shameful infection . . . ."
* * *
". . . She had never imagined that curiosity was one of the many masks of love."
* * *
(in the house of prostitution) "It was difficult to imagine the things that men left after love. They left vomit and tears, which seemed understandable to her, but they also left many enigmas of intimacy . . . Some came back for the items they had lost, but most were unclaimed and Lotario Thugot kept them under lock and key and thought that sooner or later the palace that had seen better days with its thousands of forgotten belongings, would become a museum of love."
* * *
"Very well, I will marry you if you promise not to make me eat eggplant."
García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
"I went to Frankfort and got drunk
With that most learn'd professor, Brunk;
I went to Worms and got more drunken
With that more learn'd professor, Ruhnken."
Richard Parson, Facetiae Cantabrigienses
"The poetry of earth is never dead . . .
the poetry of earth is ceasing never."
John Keats, "On the Grasshopper and the Cricket"
"Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk."
Henry David Thoreau
"Evil is wrought by want of Thought
As well as want of Heart."
Thomas Hood, "The Lady's Dream"
"Our eyes have met
Our lips, not yet
But oh you kid
I'll get you yet."
from Yours 'Til Niagra Falls
"I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance."
Socrates
"A liar needs a good memory."
Quintillian, De Institutione Oratoria, IV
"On this hapless earth
There's small sincerity of mirth,
And laughter oft is but an art
To drown the outcry of the heart.
Hartley Coleridge, "Address to Certain Gold-Fishes"
"Figures won't lie, but liars will figure."
Gen. C.H. Grosvenor in a speech to the House of Representatives
"Life is just one damned thing after another."
Frank Ward O'Malley, reportedly
"Things come and go," [the dragon] said. "That's the gist of it. In a billion billion billion years, everything will have come and gone several times, in various forms. Even I will be gone. A certain man will absurdly kill me. A terrible pity--loss of a remarkable form of life. Conservationists will howl."
* * *
"Pick an apocalypse, any apocalypse."
* * *
"My knowledge of the future does not cause the future. It merely sees it, exactly as creatures at your low level recall things past."
* * *
"They build the whole world out of teeth deprived of bodies to chew or be chewed on."
* * *
"How does this jug differ from anything animate? . . . By organization! Exactly! This jug is an absolute democracy of atoms. It has importance, or thereness, so to speak but no Expression, or loosely, ah-ha!ness."
* * *
"Expression, however--listen closely now--expression is founded on the finite occasion."
wisdom from the Dragon, a character from John Gardner's Grendel
"Ask what sweetness of thy kiss--
Ask of thyself what beauty is."
P. J. Bailey, Festus
"Man's love is of man's life a thing part,
'Tis a woman's whole existence."
* * *
"In her first passion woman loves her lover;
In all the others, all she loves is love."
Lord Byron, Don Juan
"Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to."
Mark Twain
"What is mind? No matter.
What is matter? Never mind."
T. H. Key, hitting on a concept I ought to have used in my metaphysics paper last term
aol chatting, last refuge of on-your-toes wit
Art: (to Damia) Wedgie is the gift that keeps on giving.
Kithkanen: I threw a snowball at a kid yesterday.
Mousie: Y'all still have snow [in New Hampshire]?
Kithkanen: No, found a pile of it on a mountain.
Mousie: "Snow come from mountaintop." "From sky, your majesty." "From sky TO mountaintop!" "That's right, your majesty." It's from The King and I : )
Kithkanen: Ok..