"The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.
Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.
The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip...
The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.
The beet was Rasputin's favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes."
Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
"I do not weep at the world. I'm too busy sharpening my oyster knife."
-
"Sometimes, I feel discriminated against. But it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How CAN any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me."
Zora Neale Hurston
"Either this wallpaper goes or I do."
the last words of Oscar Wilde
"Let not our longings slay the appetite of our living."
Jim Eliott
"Knowledge of what you love somehow comes to you; you don't have to read nor analyze nor study. If you love a thing enough, knowledge of it seeps into you, with particulars more real than any chart can furnish."
Jessamyn West
"I've developed a new philosophy...I only dread one day at a time."
Charlie Brown
"my boyfriend would rather make love to the playstation/television/ BCLC/buffet line/guys at sportscenter than he would me.
such is life with men."
Courtney's plan file
"...then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for lifes not a paragraph
And death I think is no parenthesis"
e.e. cummings
"It is a happy talent to know how to play."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Swedish hillbilly-techno outfit Rednex scored a huge hit with 'Cotton-Eye Joe,' then politely went away forever."
-
"Still, nothing quite tops Jordy, the four-year-old French techno star who scored a hit in 1992 with the song 'Dur Dur D'etre Bebe! (It's Tough To Be A Baby),' which addresses such hot-button issues as nose-picking, teeth-brushing, and grandma."
-
"When did Perry Farrell sell his soul to the pixie-sprites and become the male Tori Amos minus the talent?"
-
My personal favorite music awards category: "Least Essential Album By A Muppet"
-
Horoscope for Libra: "Some of your coworkers may believe that words hurt, but just wait until you hit them in the face with the stapler."
theonion.com
"Sometimes I think I should put on some pants."
-
"Don't you need to change your plan file Eve? It's been two hours or something."
-
"Eve, were you good at art when you just started?"
-
"Oh my gosh! Did they just say semen gum?"
Susan
"My life is absolutely meaningless. When I consider the different periods into which it falls, it seems like the word Schnur in the [German] dictionary, which means in the first place a string, in the second, a daughter-in-law. The only thing lacking is that the word Schnur should mean in the third place a camel, in the fourth, a dust-brush."
-
"And what wine is so foaming, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!"
-
I was carried up into the seventh heaven. There all the gods sat assembled. By special grace I was granted the favor of a wish. "Will you," said Mercury, "have youth, or beauty, or power, or a long life, or the most beautiful maiden, or any of the other glories we have in the chest? Choose, but only one thing." For a moment I was at a loss. Then I addressed myself to the gods as follows: "Most honorable contemporaries, I choose this one thing, that I may always have the laugh on my side."
-
"People commonly travel around the world to see rivers and mountains, new stars, birds of rare plumage, queerly deformed fishes, ridiculous breeds of men--they abandon themselves to the bestial stupor which gapes at existence, and they think they have seen something."
-
"...and it is a contradiction to forget the whole content of one's life and yet remain the same man."
-
Prof. Lacy's paraphrase: "Boredom is an expression of despair."
Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or
"I will continue to live the concepts that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. believed in until the day I die..."
Amanda, 8th grade Snowden Middle School essay winner
"Contrary to popular belief, Redneck is not a dialect."
Jason
"We think more than white faces should be seen on color t.v."
-
"Most people wanted to be Y2K compliant. [Prejudiced] people like these seem more KKK compliant."
Julian Bond
"If you can't beat it, suck it, Susan."
Kalman
"What's the point of having two useless majors instead of just one?"
Weatherman on dropping philosophy in favor of Greek/Roman studies
Mike: Were you looking at my bum?
Eve: Yes, I was looking at your bum, because it was on your shoulders.
"YES, I talk to guys too."
Margie, argumentatively to Kosta
Asok the Intern: I found many areas for improvement in your document, Alice. I'm only an intern, but these errors stand out like huge, red, blinking lights. You could put them on top of an ambulance as a warning.
Alice: I was thinking the same thing about you.
-
Wally: I'm thinking of growing a beard to disguise the fact that I have no chin. Then I'll get some loose sweaters to disguise the fact that I have no waist.
Alice: Maybe you should get a Sherlock Holmes outfit to disguise the fact that you have no clue.
Scott Adams, Dilbert
"So in the sunset of our week, we scramble to finish what we have begun (and ought to have begun sooner), and then sit back to drain whatever was left in our souls, until we're enveloped in a tranquil silence, without need, without care to fill our lives with traffic or trauma again. It's a time to be empty, like the sky should be after a sunset on a cloudy and comfortable day."
-
"
"It's winter and it shows everywhere, from the pale look in other people's eyes to the breathless ennui borne of waiting for things that will never happen."
-
"The more philosophy courses I take, the more I know about philosophy, but the less I can write coherently about it. When I reach enlightenment, I'll be transformed into a gibbering drooling baboon who only communicates with an imperfect system of pointing and grunting."
Eve's snippets of daily commentary, appearing regularly on plan files
"But when I fell in love with this woman, I didn't know she was a woman--I thought she was a boy!"
Black Adder
"A friend is another self."
Aristotle
"Want to hear something funny? This girl was telling me that when she comes down on her boyfriend and swallows, she is eating her possible children. I found that sick and funny."
Tressa
"I support the death penalty because I believe it saves lives."
George W. Bush
"We may be through with the past, but the past isn't through with us."
-
"I really do have love to give; I just don't know where to put it."
Magnolia
"Art is not a mirror. Art is a hammer."
attributed to Bertolt Brecht
"O painter who painted me
in this vague tableau of life
so well, that I almost seem
to be real; Oh paint me
again, and badly, so that I
may seem unreal."
Juan Ramon Jimenez, translated by Eloise Roach
"For good or bad, a boy never knows just how important he is to a girl."
-
"I could use a good blow to the head."
Jeannette
"Shut up, English major! Trying to find meaning when it isn't there!"
Jeremy
"If a friend is in trouble, don't annoy him by asking if there is anything you can do. Think up something appropriate and do it."
Edgar Watson Howe
"We don't say everything that we could
So that we can say later
Oh, you misunderstood
I hold my cards
Up close to my chest
I say what I have to
And I hold back the rest."
Ani Difranco
"The compulsion to know everything is the road to insanity."
E.E. Schattschneider
"I once you movie in the dark my hands growth to cursing touching feelings blending publishers all, that's that's all folks theory ceded to
I think of aorta printed out."
Kalman's defective voice-recognition software
"Language, like other social constructs, is environmentally influenced. For
instance, there are 10 Russian words for 'starving' and 12 for 'mono-brow'."
thespark.com
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something."
Plato
"Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example."
-
"Of all God's creatures, there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat."
Mark Twain
"Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at
play".
Heraclitus
"Someday we'll look back on this moment and plow into a parked car."
Evan Davis
Discussion on sex:
Eve: There ought to be an Institute of Virginity, where they send you a certificate when you lose it and a little sticker to wear on the back of your hand, like a banana sticker.
Jeannette: They should be scratch and sniff.
Eve: Ewww!
Jeannette: Not of any fowl [sic] odor, dear.
Eve: Not like chicken?
Jeannette: Just that I'm always in favor of stickers that smell good.
Eve: That's going on my plan file.
Jeannette: What's a plan file?
[She missed her misspelling and, mercifully, the pun. Bless 'er.]
"Individualism causes fractions in society."
Guy at philosophy club, hitting upon hotbutton issue of the day
"Damn fate, or whatever Shakespear[e] said about fate."
Jeff
Brad: If 'The Lady Or The Tiger?' was an American movie, it'd have ended with the door opening to the lady. If it were European, it'd be the tiger.
Kosta: What if it were a Japanese film?
Eve: Then it'd be an ice cube.
Steve: The Titans are folding like a chair.
Susan: No, they're folding like your mom.
"Momma give me my medicine--make me feel like a tall tree...."
Rob's plan file
"Be a prostitute - do ANYTHING but become a physics major."
Lorin
"The place God calls you to ... is the place where your deepest gladness and the world's hunger meet."
Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking
"Use of too many ten cent words leaves you with a dollar's worth of crap."
Brad
"Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms."
George Eliot
"Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want"
Joseph Wood Krutch