"Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain."
Lily Tomlin
"Art is the one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting."
Elizabeth Barret Browning
"In the history of the United States there has never been an alligator that has crawled that high before!"
A drill sergeant shouting outside my brother's barracks dorm room. My brother's comment as he closed the door:
"I don't want to know"
Libby: What makes you so afraid of attachments?
Herb: Unattachments.
(from Erinn's plan file)
"And that inverted bowl we call the Sky
Where under crawling coop't we live and die
Lift not your hands to it for help--for it
As impotently rolls as you and I."
Rybaiyat of Omar Khayyam
"It was, for a change, not a dark and stormy night. While taking out the trash, I felt a slug underfoot, again, and looked up at the unusually bright sky. Ruralesque living affords a good shot of the Milky Way even as close to downtown as I live, and I stood by the huge dark limb that fell this weekend and thought about painting the fallen branch in a tangible, wet night's darkness, with some Caravaggio influenced light from the front porch to add some badass atmosphere. I am reeling from the retrograde nature of the weekend, but apparently not form the retrograde motion of Neptune. Which is good, because apparently Neptune can be a bitch."
an artistic/astronomical/astrological ramble
"Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous mind."
Samuel Johnson
On Madame Bovary:
Brad: 300 pages, and she's still bored.
Eve: You'd think she'd get a hobby.
Brad: Yeah, like suicide.
From The Autumn of the Patriarch:
"... and one January afternoon we had seen a cow contemplating the sunset from the presidential balcony, just imagine, a cow on the balcony of the nation, what an awful thing, what a sh*tty country ...."
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"... [The president's mother] had said I'm tired of begging God to overthrow my son, because all this business of living in the presidential palace is like having the lights on all the time, sir, and she had said it with the same naturalness with which on one national holiday she had made her way through the guard of honor with a basket of empty bottles and reached the presidential limousine that was leading the parade of celebration in an uproar of ovations and martial music and storms of flowers and she shoved the basket through the window and shouted to her son that since you'll be passing right by take advantage and return these bottles to the store on the corner, poor mother."
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"... he walked about in the midst of the downpour [of the hurricane] wondering with an aftertaste of musk where can you be Manuela Sánchez of my bad saliva, God damn it, where can you have hidden yourself that this disaster of my vengeance hasn't reached you?"
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"... [H]e had not survived everything because of his inconceivable courage or his infinite prudence but because he was the only one among us who knew the real size of our destiny ...."
Gabriel García Márquez
"Listening, not imitation, may be the sincerest form of flattery."
Dr. Joyce Brothers
"I must Create a System or be enslav'd by another Man's. I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create."
William Blake, stolen from greld's plan file
"I never turn down an opportunity to have sex or appear on television."
Gore Vidal