Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh."
Voltaire
"MAYONNAISE, n.
One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion."
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
"You can tell a lot about a fellow's character by his way of eating jellybeans."
Ronald Reagan
"I pragmatically turn all my whims into principles!"
Calivn and Hobbes
Thanx to my most favorite M'shelle for the following three quotes, sent with her random and always welcome e-distributions of poemtry.
"Se questo è errore e su me è risultato,
allora né ho scritto, né nessuno ha amato.
Billy Shakespeare
"I thought I was not alone, walking here by the shore,
But the one I thought was with me, as now I walk by the shore,
As I lean and look through the glimmering light--that one has utterly
disappeared,
And those appear that perplex me."
Walt Whitman
"Thank you for being there
Nobody has to care
Thank you for being here
Because you are not there."
Gertrude Stein
"He's got a big stick in one hand and the guy's hair in the other. I don't think he's going to bless him."
Professor Coonin
"When I would like to learn what I did, I learn only what I was thinking."
E.B. White
"All men come broken; you just have to fix them."
Lauris Hua
"You're the kind that always loses,
Bliss and you are all at odds:
You're too sweet when chance refuses
And too clever when it nods."
Aleksandr Pushkin
"If thine enemy wrong thee, buy each of his children a drum."
Chinese proverb
"Television is not the truth. Television is a god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, story tellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players."
"Network"
"If you can't learn to read or write, you will learn how to steal and kill."
Harry Belafonte
"I'm going to commit . . . gluttony!"
Joseph
"The first funky pontiff."
Bono, on John Paul II, who tried on the singer's wraparound sunglasses
"It is kind of you to indulge your elders in their vices."
"Gods and Monsters"
"And then black night. That blackness was sublime.
I felt distributed through space and time:
One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand
Under the pebbles of a panting strand,
One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain,
In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain.
There were dull throbs in my Triassic; green
Optical spots in Upper Pleistocene,
An icy shiver down my Age of Stone,
And all tomorrows in my funnybone."
-
" . . . My secret stamp,
The Shade impress. The mystery inborn.
Miracles, mirages, midsummer morn."
-
"And so I pare my nails, and muse, and hear
Your steps upstairs, and all is right, my dear."
-
"And with his toe renewing tap-warmth, he'd
Sit there like a king, and like Marat bleed."
-
"Man's life as commentary to abtruse
unfinished poem. Note for further use."
-
"We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing."
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
"I yearn to shout
And dance about
And stick pickles in my honker."
Emily Dickinson, modified by Berke Breathed
". . . The thing to be done won't wait on the leisure of the doer but the doer, must of necessity pay close attention to his work rather than treating it as a secondary occupation."
Socrates, from Plato's The Republic