Turning and turning in the widening gyre  The falcon cannot
 hear the falconer;  Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,  The blood-dimmed 
tide is loosed, and everywhere  The ceremony of innocence 
is drowned;  The best lack all conviction, while the worst  
Are full of passionate intensity.
 	-William Butler Yeats,   “The Second Coming”

They paved paradise  And put up a parking lot.
		-Joni Mitchell,  “Big Yellow Taxi” 


The world is a perpetual caricature of itself; at every 
moment it is the mockery and the contradiction of 
what it is pretending to be.
 		-George Santayana

"Our achievements may make us interesting...
but our darkness makes us loveable."
		from: Shampoo Planet (D. Coupland)

"It is awfully hard work doing nothing." 
	-"The Importance of Being Earnest,"
                      by Oscar Wilde

“The beet is the most intense of vegetables.  The radish, 
admittedly, is the more feverish, but the fire of the radish
 is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not passion.  Tomatoes 
are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an 
undercurrent of frivolity.  Beets are deadly serious.”
			- Tom Robbins
			“Jitterbug Perfume”

“Ajoutha -a card game that normally takes a least eight hours.
  I was a game the Portuguese had taught the Sinhalese in 
the 15th century to keep them quiet and preoccupied while
 they invaded the country.”  
			- Michael Ondaatje
			“Running In The Family”

“We, with our propensity for murder, torture, slavery, rape, 
cannibalism, pillage, advertising jingles, shag carpets, and 
golf, how could we seriously be considered as the perfection 
of a four-billion-year-old grandiose experiment?”
			- Tom Robbins
			“Half Asleep In Frog Pajamas”

"So I say to you today, my friends, that even through we face
  the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.
  It is a dream that one day this nation will rise up and
  live out the true meaning of its creed-we hold these truths to be
  self-evident, that all men are created equal. I have a dream my
  four little children will one day live in a nation where they will
  not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of
  their character."
					- Martin Luther King Jr.

Lightning flashes,
Sparks shower,
In one blink of an eye
You have missed seeing.
		-Zen saying

“I know what I’m thinking bout, I think.  Nothing. 
 And as much as I can.”
		-Alice Walker, from The Colour Purple

“Timbuktu. Hometown of mystery, fugivity’s final refuge, 
remote cross-roads where Obscurity runs into Exotica, 
and Daydream and Exile intersect.  Timbuktu.  The far 
of which there is no farther.”
	- Tom Robbins, “Half Asleep In Frog Pajamas”
						
“SHE HAD DEBATED, in the frivolity of the beginning,
 whether to build a hole or a tower; a hole because she
 was fond of hobbits, or a tower - well, a tower for many 
reasons, but chiefly because she liked spiral stairways.”
			-Keri Hulme, “The Bone People”


Education ... has produced a vast population able 
to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading. 
			-G.M. Trevelyan

	Do I dare
	Disturb the universe?
	In a minute there is time
	For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
						-T. S. Eliot

"Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person;
having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all
out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful
hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with
the breath of kindness, blow the rest away." 
						-T.S. Eliot

"Every blade of grass has its Angel that 
bends over it and whispers, 'Grow. Grow.'" 
 		-The Talmud 

"Writing and rewriting are a constant search 
for what it is one is saying."
		-John Updike

"How do I know what I think until I see what I say?"
			-E.M. Forster

History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken
                                   	-James Joyce

"The world always makes the assumption that 
the exposure of an error is identical with the 
discovery of truth--that the error and truth are 
simply opposite.  They are nothing of the sort. 
What the world turns to, when it is cured on one 
error, is usually simply another error, and maybe 
one worse than the first one."
		-H. L. Mencken

The Tao that can be known is not Tao.
 The substance of the World is only a name for Tao.
 Tao is all that exists and may exist;
 The World is only a map of what exists and may exist.
			-The Tao te Ching

 When Beauty is recognized in the World
 Ugliness has been learned;
 When Good is recognized in the World
 Evil has been learned.
			-The Tao te Ching

 Tao is a depthless vessel;
 Used by the Self, it is not filled by the World;
 It cannot be cut, knotted, dimmed or stilled;
 Its depths are hidden, ubiquitous and eternal;
 I don't know where it came from;
 It came before Nature.
			-The Tao te Ching

 Stretch a bow to its limit and it is soon broken;
 Temper a blade to its sharpest and it is soon blunted;
 Amass the greatest treasure and it is soon stolen;
 Claim credit and honour and you will soon fall;
 Retire once your purpose is achieved - this is the way of Nature.
			-The Tao te Ching

"When you wake up in the morning, Pooh," said Piglet at last,
 "what's the first thing you say to yourself?" 
"What's for breakfast? said Pooh. "What do you say, Piglet?" 
"I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?" said Piglet. 
     Pooh nodded thoughtfully. 
 "It's the same thing," he said. 
		-Winnie the Pooh

To hell with words -- see something!
		-Peter Elbow
	
“She entered the story knowing she would emerge
 from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives 
of others, in plots that stretch back twenty years, 
her body full of sentences and moments, as if 
awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by 
unremembered dreams.”
	-Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

“Water is in the exile, carried back in cans and flasks,
 the ghost between your hands and your mouth”
	-Michael Ondaatje The English Patient

“I love the word ‘curl’, such  a slow word, you can’t rush it. . . .”
	-Michael Ondaatje The English Patient

“Pooh looked down at his two paws.  He knew that 
one of them was right, and he knew that when you 
had decided that one of them was right, then the 
other one was left, but he could never remember how 
to begin”
		-Winnie the Pooh

“Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit has Brain.”
There was along silence.
“I suppose,” said Pooh “that that’s why 
he never understands anything.”
		-Winnie the Pooh

“And if anyone knows anything about anything,” 
said Bear to himself, “It’s Owl who knows something 
about something,” he said, “or my name’s not 
Winnie-the-Pooh” he said.  “Which it is,” 
he added. “So there you are.”
		-Winnie the Pooh

The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is 
the Zen you bring up there. 
		-Robert M. Pirsig

"Never offend people with style when you
 can offend them with substance."
                      		   -Sam Brown

Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs. 
			-Aldous Huxley

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it,
 doesn't go away."
                                      -Philip K. Dick

"Science may have found a cure for most evils,
but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all-
-the apathy of human beings."
				-Helen Keller

The winds and waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.   
  -Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

"Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff."   
					- Frank Zappa


For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I
didn't know I knew... I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. 
Writing...is discovering. 
				 		-Robert Frost

Meaning is not thought up and then written down. The act of writing is an
act of thought. All writing is experimental in the beginning. It is an
attempt to solve a problem, to find a meaning, to discover its own way
towards a meaning.
						-Donald Murray

Political history is largely an account of mass violence and of the
    expenditure of vast resources to cope with mythical fears and hopes.
					-Murray Edelman

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket
fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are
not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed ." 
                           -Dwight D. Eisenhower

We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us
is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch.
Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous
delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.
                                                - e. e. cummings

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my
contempt.  He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the
spinal cord would suffice.
                                                - Mark Twain

A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and
be free.
                                        - Nikos Kazantzakis



To be nobody-but-yourself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and
day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which
any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
                                        - e.e. cummings

"The craving for the fantastic, for the strange, is legitimate 
and perpetual; everyone with a sense of beauty has it." 
				-T.S. Eliot

What remains of them, three ordinary folk
Bombed off the floor they stood on, one

Postage-stamped to the door, now passing by 
As if they had been far away and here
Returning home with the answer they can't give

To the question everyone asks.
                -Gordon Mason (from 'The Funerals')

"The gods can either take away evil from the world and will
 not, or, being willing to do so cannot; or they neither can
 nor will, or lastly, they are both able and willing.  If
 they have the will to remove evil and cannot, then they are
 not omnipotent.  If they can, but will not, then they are
 not benevolent.  If they are neither able nor willing, then
 they are neither omnipotent nor benevolent.  Lastly, if they
 are both able and willing to annihilate evil, how does it
 exist?" 
				- Epicurus

"When you come right down to it all you have is yourself.  The sun is a 
thousand rays in your belly.  All the rest is nothing."
				-Pablo Picasso

"What is it: is man only a blunder of God, or is God only a blunder of
man?"
				-Nietzsche

“The world is a comedy to those who think;  a tragedy to those who feel.”
			-The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler

"Arguing with a person's faith is like chasing them around a big empty
parking lot. You can keep backing them up, and backing them up--but you
never actually corner them."
                - George Weilacher

"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to
the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his
children smart."
                         -H.L. Mencken

"Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that 
influences our lives does not consist of what happened, 
but of what men believe happened."
					-Gerald W. Johnston

I'm only seven, although I died 
In Hiroshima long ago,
I'm seven now as I was then -
When children die, they do not grow.
             -Nazim Hikmet (from _I Come and Stand at Every Door_)

Swing hard, in case they throw the ball where you're swinging. 
					-Duke Snider

Then Arjuma saw in both armies fathers, grandfathers, sons, grandsons;
      fathers of wives, uncles, masters; brothers companions and friends.

When Arjuna thus saw his kinsmen face to face in both lines of battle,
      he was overcome by grief and despair 
      and thus he spoke with a sinking heart.
                                  -from _The Bhaghavad Gita_

"When you stop learning, stop listening, stop looking and asking 
questions, always new questions, then it is time to die."
					-Lillian Smith

"On the plus side, death is one of the few things that can be done just
 as easily lying down."
                				- Woody Allen

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares 
that it is his duty. 
					-George Bernard Shaw

"One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to come up to you and 
show you a nice brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet 
broken, and this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the 
Jack of Spades jump out of the deck and squirt cider in your ear.  But, 
son, do not bet this man, for as sure as you are standing there, you are 
going to end up with an earful of cider."
					-Damon Runyon

Emotions are not always subject to reason ...
but they are always subject to action.
When thoughts do not neutralize
an undesirable emotion, action will.
	     - William James

The truth will set you free,
but first it will make you miserable.
     		- James A. Garfield

Flugg's Law:
	When you need to knock on wood is when you realize that the
	world is composed of vinyl, naugahyde and aluminum.
						-unknown

Science is what happens when preconception meets verification.
						-unknown

"I detest life-insurance agents; they always argue that I shall some day
 die, which is not so."
			-Stephen Leacock

"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity 
opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social 
environment. Most people are even incapable of 
forming such opinions."
			- Albert Einstein

Until you make peace with who you are,
you'll never be content with what you have.
			- Doris Mortman

You can't expect to win
unless you know why you lose.
			- Benjamin Lipson

"Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we dislike."
			- Oscar Wilde

Character is what you are in the dark.
                  - Dwight L. Moody

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.  He to whom
this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe,
is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
                     - Einstein

One man scorned and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of
courage to reach the unreachable stars; and the world will be better for
this.
                            - Cervantes

"When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian 
or a European, or anything else, you are being violent.  Do 
you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself 
from the rest of mankind.  When you separate yourself by belief, 
by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence.  So a man who is 
trying to understand violence does not belong to any country, to 
any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned 
with the total understanding of mankind."
				-J. Krishnamurti

The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of 
nuclear giants and ethical infants. 
					-Gen. Omar Bradley

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